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The London School of Economics and Political Science

The Discourse of Exceptionalism and U.S. Grand Strategy, 1946–2009

Alexander Florey Woolfson

A thesis submitted to the Department of International Relations of the London School of Economics for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, London, March 2012

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Declaration

I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it).

The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent.

I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party.

I declare that my thesis consists of 95,291 words.

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Abstract

This thesis argues that American exceptionalism is a necessary, but insufficient,

way of reading U.S. foreign policy. Exceptionalism is employed by different

ideologists in different ways and in differing contexts. This thesis employs the

contextualist methodology of Quentin Skinner to challenge proleptic, static

understandings of American exceptionalism and, in doing so, uncovers American

grand strategy as a keenly contested ideological battleground. In each constituent

case study, the thesis identifies the ideological innovators of American strategic

policy and the key moments of ideological innovation, and examines why

ideological innovations became conventional, or not.

The analysis proceeds with an introduction to the composition of grand strategy,

continues with an examination of Quentin Skinner’s version of Cambridge School

contextual analysis, and then places Skinnerian contextualism within the broader

framework of International Relations theory. This analysis illustrates the

methodological advantage of Skinnerian contextualism, which allows the

reconstruction of the context in which past generations of ideological innovators

operated and conceived of the world and the place of the United States within it.

This specific type of analysis demonstrates ideological innovation in practice at

four pivotal moments in American foreign policy: first, the emergence of

containment as the cornerstone of the Truman Doctrine at the outset of the Cold

War; second, détente and the supposed injection of realism into American foreign

policy; third, President Clinton’s strategy of enlargement and the place of

American exceptionalism in the aftermath of the Cold War; and, fourth, the Bush

Doctrine and the interaction between American exceptionalism and

neoconservatism.

The thesis concludes by stressing the particularities of historical context, having

demonstrated that, although exceptionalism has rarely been the only causal

dynamic of American grand strategy, it has consistently provided the context with

which innovating ideologists have been required to engage in order to create their

own version of grand strategy.

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Contents

Acknowledgements 6 1 The Cambridge School and the Discourse of Exceptionalism in U.S.

Grand Strategy 8 Rationale and hypothesis 8 Grand Strategy in the United States 12 Methodology: Cambridge School Contextualism 22 The Cambridge School in practice: the methodology of

contextualism 24 The Cambridge School and American Grand Strategy 28 2 Quentin Skinner’s Contextualism and International Relations 30 Realism 30 Liberalism 38 Neo-Gramscian International Relations 42 Quentin Skinner’s project and the linguistic turn 48 Skinnerian contextualism and constructivism 57 3 Exceptionalism, The Republic, and The Evolution of American Foreign

Policy and International Thought, 1783–1945 68 The Constitution, the Union, and the balance of power 72 Dividing the world and The Monroe Doctrine 79 The move to world power and the duty of civilisation 81 Woodrow Wilson, the abandonment of hemispheric detachment

and a ‘peace of justice’ 83 From World War to Cold War 87 Conclusion 89 4 Exceptionalism and Containment, 1946–1950 91 Step one of contextual analysis: What was the author doing in

writing a text in relation to other available texts that made up the ideological context? 96

Henry Luce’s “American Century” 100 Walter Lippmann’s Cold War 104 Step two of contextual analysis: what was the author doing in

producing a text in relation to available and problematic political action, which makes up the practical context? 109

Step three of contextual analysis: the identification of ‘containment’ as an ideological move 112

Step four of contextual analysis: The Truman Doctrine 119 Step five of contextual analysis: NSC-68 124 Conclusion 128 5 The Rise and Fall of Détente 130 Step one of contextual analysis: the available meanings of détente

and related concepts 131 Step two of contextual analysis: Nixon’s and Kissinger’s use of the

word détente in relation to the practical context 140 Step three of contextual analysis: Nixonian détente as an

ideological move 145 Step four of contextual analysis: détente and the alteration of

political vocabulary 150

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Step five of contextual analysis: détente’s decline 157 Conclusion 160 6 Bill Clinton, ‘The New World Order’, and the Strategy of ‘Engagement

and Enlargement’ 162 Step one of contextual analysis: the ideological context of the

Clinton presidency 167 Step two of contextual analysis: Clinton’s ideological manoeuvre 182 Step three of contextual analysis: the strategy of engagement and

enlargement as an ideological move 188 Step four of contextual analysis: the strategy of engagement and

enlargement and the alteration of political vocabulary 194 Step five of contextual analysis: ‘enlargement’, the new world

order? 204 Conclusion 207 7 The Bush Doctrine and the Neoconservative Moment 209 Step one of contextual analysis: the Bush Doctrine’s ideological

and linguistic context 211 Step two of contextual analysis: Bush’s ideological manoeuvre as a

political manoeuvre 225 Step three of contextual analysis: the Bush Doctrine as an

ideological move 231 Step four: the Bush Doctrine and the alteration of political

vocabulary 239 Step five of contextual analysis: a neoconservative future? 243 Conclusion 244 8 Conclusion 247 Bibliography 257

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Acknowledgements

Writing a doctoral thesis is a long and arduous project and would not have been

possible, in my case, without a great deal of intellectual and moral support. I

would like, therefore, to extend my thanks to everyone who has helped me along

the way. I want to thank my parents, Gerald and Lynne Woolfson. Without years

of their love, support, and counsel none of this would have been possible. I

dedicate this thesis to them with my love. My love also goes to Hannah Lloyd,

who is probably more familiar with this thesis than she might like! For all of her

support, patience, and love I am tremendously appreciative.

I would especially like to thank my supervisors Mick Cox and George Lawson,

who have provided fantastic mentorship and feedback throughout the process.

They have also been a source of great encouragement through what have, at times,

been challenging moments. The International Relations department at the LSE has

been incredibly supportive as a whole and for that I am extremely grateful; special

thanks must go to Martina Langer. I would also like to acknowledge the late Fred

Halliday: he not only provided the support for my starting doctoral research in the

first place but also patiently critiqued my early research proposals; I learnt an

incredible amount with his remote guidance, doing archival research for him

whilst in Washington.

The Economic and Social Research Council have fully funded my research and I

offer my deepest thanks for that support. My thanks must go also to the Graduate

School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University for a fantastic year spent as a

visiting fellow. They were incredibly welcoming and provided a remarkable range

of resources to help me manage the practicalities of an unforgettably harsh New

England winter. My year in America proved to be a considerable turning point for

my research. That is in large part due to David Armitage’s tutelage in intellectual

history, and I owe him a great debt of gratitude. The same is true of the guidance I

received from the late Ernest May. It was a privilege to have been part of what

proved to be his final graduate seminar series. I can’t imagine meeting a more

humane and erudite person and I’m sad that I won’t be able to send him the

finished thesis. I hope he would approve. David Armitage and Peter Bol’s

graduate seminar series “Methods in Intellectual History” proved a fertile and

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rigorous test bed for much of my work and my thanks goes out to all my fellow

attendees for their incisive comments.

I also want to thank Georg Brun, Peter Collmer, Christa Wirth, Philipp Michelus,

Olivier Senn, and Jason Rockett, all of whom took the time to carefully read and

comment on my work.

Quentin Skinner has been extremely generous with his time and far more

amenable to dialogue than I could have hoped for. I would also like to thank

Duncan Bell and Richard Serjeantson for sharing their own experiences: they

have both been more helpful than they perhaps realise.

I want to thank my friends Adam Wise, Daniel Brown, Daniel Blum, Toby Glyn,

James Noyes, and Benjamin Webb for years of comradeship and distraction, and

for reminding me that there is life outside the PhD – but I want to reassure them

that being thanked doesn’t mean that they now have to read the thesis.

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Chapter 1. The Cambridge School and the Discourse of

Exceptionalism in U.S. Grand Strategy

Rationale and hypothesis

The central argument made in this thesis is that American exceptionalism is a

necessary yet insufficient way of understanding American grand strategy. It is

insufficient because it has always been a source of ideological contestation,

employed in different ways, by different people, and in different contexts, to

support and enable different grand strategic projects. This thesis applies the

contextualism of Quentin Skinner to recreate and examine the contested discourse

of American exceptionalism at four critical junctures and will illustrate the way in

which these ideological struggles shaped grand strategy by enabling ideological

innovation whilst at the same time also limiting the degree of possible

transformation. In doing so, this thesis will show how this debate about the nature

of America and its place in the world, which has imbued American political life at

least since the Declaration of Independence, has had a far more flexible meaning

than previous scholarship suggests, but it will also show that the political actors

who created grand strategy were to a significant extent bound by the ideological

conventions of their predecessors.

This chapter serves three primary functions. First, it will set out the rationale and

hypothesis for the thesis. Second, it will explicate the notion of grand strategy as

an ideologically contested space in the United States. Third, it will introduce the

methodological approach of Cambridge School contextualism.

Three faulty assumptions are made in the academic analysis of the role of

exceptionalism in American foreign policy: (1) that American grand strategy is

only sometimes ideological (this thesis will argue that it is always underpinned by

ideology); (2) that exceptionalism has meant the same thing over time; and (3)

that exceptionalism is used as a rationale for the same kinds of political project or

for the same political ends.

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Richard Hofstadter claims that Americans do not embrace ideologies because

America is an ideology.1 Here, Hofstadter argues that a set of beliefs that

epitomise American values and the American way of life frame every American

policy decision and, Hofstadter argues implicitly, that these beliefs exist at a very

fundamental, yet tacit, level that transcends most party political debate. He

suggests that, whilst Americans are not necessarily able to consciously articulate

an ideology or acknowledge that they embrace an ideology, they are imbued with

the ideology of America: that is to say that, by virtue of being American, they

derive part of their own personal identify, and thereby their tacit beliefs, from this

overarching societal dynamic. These tacit beliefs are clustered around the ill-

defined idea that the United States is an extraordinary nation with a special role to

play in human history and is in some sense distinct both in characteristics and

behaviour from other states. The nature of America’s difference from other states

and how this should be expressed in terms of international conduct has

nonetheless legitimised a wide range of different strategic approaches from

unilateralism to periods of national disillusionment, self-condemnation, and

isolationism.

In its most benign form, ideology2 simply refers to a body of thought, “a language

of politics defined by its conventions and employed by a number of writers.”3 In

this thesis, American exceptionalism is treated as just this: a language of politics

about America’s place in the world. This thesis treats American exceptionalism as

‘para-ideological’, the crystallisation of a loose language of politics that explains

the world and the American role therein. Whilst exceptionalism might not be

shown to have the coherence of a formal ideology it can be shown to underpin

political discourse in the United States. In recreating that contested discourse of

exceptionalism the thesis challenges the notion that American exceptionalism has

1 Hofstadter in Michael Kazin, “The Right’s Unsung Prophets,” The Nation, 248 (February 20, 1989): 242. 2 The use of the term “ideology” is the subject of considerable contestation and is frequently used in very different, ill-defined ways and often inconsistently by the same authors. See John Gerring, “Ideology: A Definitional Analysis,” Political Research Quarterly, 50, no. 4 (1997): 957–94 for a useful survey and analysis of the use of the term. See also Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3 James Tully, “The Pen is a Mighty Sword,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 9.

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trans-historical homogeneity of meaning or that it has been codified as a means

towards one single definable strategic end.

On the sole occasion where he explicitly defines ideological argument, Quentin

Skinner describes it as argument “intertwined with claims to social power.”4 This

is a less benign use of the term, suggesting a rhetorical strategy aimed at

achieving some sort of distortion. What distinguishes Skinner’s account of

ideology from other critical accounts is that, unlike Marxist or feminist accounts,

which do share Skinner’s understanding that an ideology is intertwined with

social power, Skinner’s conception has no a priori sense of ascribing who might

be trying to exercise that power or why.5

In an area of scholarship that has been dominated by diplomatic historians on one

disciplinary wing and realists on the other,6 the examination of exceptionalism

and American foreign policy has neglected to treat American grand strategy as

intellectual history. Where American exceptionalism has been treated as a discrete

ideology its treatment has tended to either be temporally limited or it has been

considered a largely static concept, not subject to political contestation.7 Unable to

find easy lines of causation between ideology and policy, diplomatic historians

who have focused on the period after 1945 have been wary of sustained

examinations of American exceptionalism. When scholars have attempted to

tackle American ideology they have rarely dealt directly with exceptionalism,

instead creating new ideological tropes or focusing on other avenues, as in the

4 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), I, 7. 5 Melvin Richter, “Pocock, Skinner and Begriffsgeschichte,” in The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction, ed. Melvin Richter (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 131. 6 See Chapter 2 for a thorough examination of existing International Relations scholarship. 7 Arnon Gutfeld, American Exceptionalism: The Effects of Plenty on the American Experience (Brighton; Portland, Ore.: Sussex Academic Press, 2002); Karl J. Holsti, “Exceptionalism in American Foreign Policy: Is It Exceptional?” European Journal of International Relations, 17, no. 3 (2011): 381–404; Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York; London: Norton, 1996); Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Trevor B. McCrisken, American Exceptionalism and the Legacy of Vietnam: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1974 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Siobhán McEvoy-Levy, American Exceptionalism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Public Diplomacy at the End of the Cold War (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave, 2001), Edward McNall Burns, The American Idea of Mission: Concepts of National Purpose and Destiny (New Brunswick, N.J.,: Rutgers University Press, 1957); Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Knopf, 2001); Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

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case of early studies drawing on the Marxist link between ideology and political

economy.8 The profusion of analytic categories, stemming from debate over what

exactly America’s ‘core values’9 were, has occluded the study of American grand

strategy as an expression of how the Washington elite viewed America as an

exceptional nation, how this shaped their sense of American purpose in the world,

and how this changed over time.

The two most in-depth attempts to grapple explicitly with exceptionalism and the

foreign policy of the U.S. – by Michael Hunt and historian Anders Stephanson10 –

exhibit another type of methodological mistake: a teleological approach. This

approach has merits: for example, it acknowledges commonalities in thought and

calls attention to humanity’s preoccupation with certain seemingly eternal

thoughts. However, the approach relies on the assumption that an idea remains

constant despite dissimilarities in its context. This approach encourages a kind of

Platonic view of thoughts, as if they somehow predated their contexts and merely

manifested, regardless of social forces or situational context. In the case of the

Cold War, the debate has largely focused on the orthodox,11 revisionist,12 and

post-revisionist debate,13 in which the scholar’s historiographic bias has deployed

the material to suit a given argument.

8 William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Co., 1959). 9 Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992); Emily S. Rosenberg, “Commentary: The Cold War and the Discourse of National Security,” Diplomatic History, 17, no. 2 (1993): 277–284; Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); William O. Walker III, National Security and Core Values in American History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 10 Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987); Stephanson, Manifest Destiny. 11 Principle examples include Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and The Peace They Sought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957); Herbert Feis, From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War (New York: Norton, 1970); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Origins of the Cold War,” Foreign Affairs, 46 (October 1967): 22–52. 12 The key text which inspired the Cold War revisionist school was William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, Ohio; New York: World Publishing Co., 1959) and, although this is an astonishing work, his sense of an American Weltanschauung which was based on exceptionalist and expansionist principles did not account for ideological change or contestation over time, rooted as it was in a critique of American capitalism. For other revisionists see Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War 1945–1971 (New York: Wiley, 1972); Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power. The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 13 The first of the post-revisionist texts was John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); Ernest May, “The

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Similar ‘raiding’ of history has occurred within the field of International

Relations.14 “Realist theorists know in advance what ‘threats’ look like, liberals

know what ‘joint gains’ look like, and constructivists know what an ‘ideational

consensus’ looks like.”15 They then apply these abstract concepts to the historical

material up to the early post-Second World War period in order to see whether

their preferred decision-making input is present.16 The problem is that the early

postwar period, like virtually any other historical period, offers sufficient

evidence to support all of these claims and others. As a point of logic this could be

valid, except that these claims, derived often from the same evidence, are often

contradictory. “Thus, each approach concentrates on the evidence that supports its

own position, downplaying the extent to which ‘threats’, ‘gains’, ‘consensus’, and

individuals’ perceptions of these factors were still forming.”17 By effectively

starting with the political meanings from the end of the period under investigation,

in which the Cold War is over, scholars have subconsciously read stability into

the earlier historical period, whereas political scientists purposefully impose

theoretical constructs. Even the term early Cold War proleptically18 implies future

bipolarity. This fact leads to an underestimation of the diversity of options that

existed at the time, the variety of proposals and plans that were advanced, and the

historical contingency of the term Cold War, whose meaning changed over time.

Grand strategy in the United States

Realists have historically raised the prescription of a realignment of policy along

realist lines at key foreign-policy junctures, most notably during the Vietnam War

and the more recent Operation Iraqi Freedom.19 The underlying suggestion of

Cold War,” in The Making of America’s Soviet Policy, ed. Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, 1984), 209–234; John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 14 This thesis distinguishes between ‘International Relations’ the academic discipline (sometimes abbreviated ‘IR’) and ‘international relations’, political relations at the international level. 15 Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Defending the West: Occidentalism and the Formation of NATO”, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 11, no. 3 (2003): 230. 16 Ernest R. May, Richard N. Rosecrance, and Zara S. Steiner, History and Neorealism (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 17 Ibid., 231. 18 A term of central importance to Quentin Skinner’s contextualist methodology. For further discussion of this term see the discussion of Skinner’s knowledge claims for his methodology in Chapter 2 of this thesis. 19 Hans J. Morgenthau, Vietnam and the United States (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1965); Hans J. Morgenthau, A New Foreign Policy for the United States (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1969); Anatole Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role

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their claims is that the pursuit of ‘the national interest’ is unique to realism and

that realist ‘national interest’ stands in contrast to other, more ideological, foreign-

policy goals. From a realist vantage point the United States is simply one nation

amongst many in an anarchic international system based upon power. Perhaps

most prominently, neorealism casts the international distribution of capabilities as

the key constraint on foreign policy.20 They argue that states define their interests

“in terms of power,”21 pursuing “aims that [have] some materially identifiable

benefit . . . for society as a whole.”22 In this light, major wars appear as sudden

manifestations of underlying shifts in the distribution of power. This thesis

suggests that such materialist analyses are insufficient on two grounds. First, since

material incentives are indeterminate and the distribution of power often

ambiguous, agents can interpret identical material changes in any number of

ways. Second, the same intersubjective understandings which guide

interpretations of material shifts can also constitute varying state interests.23

In fact, realism’s competitors are equally concerned with the pursuit of the

‘national interest’ but disagree about the nature and extent of the objectives which

compromise ‘the national interest’. “The main debates surrounding U.S. foreign

policy are best understood as disputes within the conceptual space of ‘the national

interest’ rather than between it and alternative strategic philosophies.”24 The point

of such observations is not to attempt to critique the efficacy of any one approach

to grand strategy but to move the discourse away from an exclusive bond between

realism and the ‘national interest’. As Aletta Norval contends, “Ideology has

always been conceived of in contrast to some order of truth or knowledge from

in the World (New York: Vintage Books, 2006); Barry R. Posen, “The Case For Restraint”, The American Interest, 3, no. 1 (2007), http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=331 [accessed 15/03/09]; John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “An Unnecessary War”, Foreign Policy (January 1, 2003), http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2003/01/01/an_unnecessary_war [accessed 16/03/09]. 20 Kenneth Neal Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass; London: Addison-Wesley, 1979). 21 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Knopf, 1948), 5. 22 Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Material Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 15. 23 For a more detailed analysis of realist and constructivist approaches to American grand strategy see Chapter 2. 24 Adam Quinn, 2008, “The ‘National Interest’ as Conceptual Battleground” (paper presented at the International Studies Association Convention March 26–29 2008, San Francisco).

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which it would be possible to discern its misleading and false character.”25 This

thesis contends that all notions of ‘national interest’ are inherently ideological and

require treatment as such and, furthermore, that existing approaches to the

ideology of American exceptionalism have failed to incorporate the

methodological advances within the study of the history of ideas and have

underestimated ideological contestation as a result.

One major contribution of critical international relations has been to problematise

the modern state as the starting point for analysis.26 Recent scholarship has built

on this approach to illustrate how the construction of the modern state and the

construction of modern modes of knowledge have operated in tandem to recast

the nature of security.27 The effect has been to demonstrate that concerns about

identity have never been absent from theories of international relations,

particularly security issues. Michael Williams remarks that “[t]he apparent

absence of a concern with identity in conceptions of security needs to be

understood in fact as an historical legacy of a conscious attempt to exclude

identity concerns from the political realm.”28 The roots of realism’s conception of

an objective national interest lie in the “liberal sensibility, in an attempt to

construct a material and objective foundation for political practice,”29 even though

that process is predicated on liberal faith in the power of science to subdue

political conflict.30

Some security scholars have noted the absence of identity from previous debate.

Because they have seen identity as compatible with neorealism they have

attempted to add identity as an intervening variable in order to strengthen

25 A. J. Norval, “The Things We Do with Words – Contemporary Approaches to the Analysis of Ideology,” British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000): 313–46. 26 Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, vol. 39 of Cambridge Studies in International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye (eds.), Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (New York: Little Brown, 1977). 27 Michael C. Williams, “Identity and the Politics of Security”, European Journal of International Relations, 4, no. 2 (1998): 204–25. 28 Ibid., 205. 29 Ibid., 206. 30 Nicolas Guilhot, “The Realist Gambit: Postwar American Political Science and the Birth of IR Theory,” International Political Sociology, 2, no. 4 (2008): 282.

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neorealist arguments.31 However, security scholars with a more critical

perspective suggest that identity’s absence from early debate cannot be glossed

over too easily.32 Lapid exhorts that we must examine “the historical context and

scholarly practices that have rendered [identity concerns] incompatible in the first

place.”33

The absence of identity in theories of security can be conceptualised as a result of

the realisation that “theories about the world, and about security were integral

elements in the political practices constituting that world.”34 Thus, both U.S.

grand strategy and a contextualist, historical approach (the method of inquiry) are

fundamentally intertwined as part of a broader critical approach to security

studies.

It is important to understand what the terms strategy and its wide-ranging

derivative grand strategy have meant at various historical points. The term

strategy has been subject to considerable misuse; it is imprecise in common

parlance, and its meaning has changed over time. Carl von Clausewitz, who still

serves as the central referent for strategic studies, defined tactics as “the theory of

the use of military forces in combat” and strategy as “the theory of the use of

combats for the object of the War.”35 Although Clausewitz provided useful

definitions, his vision was unsurprisingly narrowly confined by the type of

military campaigns of his time. Clausewitz’s definition could not adequately

describe the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which were altered

by the conception and execution of ‘total war’, or the mobilisation of the fully

available resources and population of the state.

31 Barry Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army and Military Power,” International Security, 18 (1993): 80–124. 32 Yosef Lapid and Friedrich V. Kratochwil, “Revisiting the National: Toward an Identity Agenda in Neorealism,” in The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, ed. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich V. Kratochwil (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996), 106; Jeffrey W. Legro and Andrew Moravcsik, “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” International Security, 24, no. 2 (1999): 5–55; Ken Booth, Theory of World Security, vol. 105 of Cambridge Studies in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 33 Yosef Lapid, “Culture’s Ship: Returns and Departures in International Relations Theory,” in The Return of Culture and Identity, ed. Yosef Lapid and F. Kratochwil (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1996), 19. 34 Williams, “Identity and the Politics of Security,” 217–18. 35 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Elliot Howard and Peter Paret (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 74.

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It was Basil Liddell Hart who provided the conceptual and genealogical leap in

the analysis of strategic thought. He observed that “the role of grand strategy –

higher strategy – is to co-ordinate and direct all the resources of a nation, or band

of nations, towards the attainment of the political object of war – the goal defined

by fundamental policy.”36 We can usefully take Hart’s notion of grand strategy as

the highest level of national strategy. But Hart went farther in his suggestion that

“the object in war is to obtain a better peace – even if only from your own point of

view. . . . [I]t is essential to conduct war with constant regard to the peace you

desire.”37 His most important conclusion following from this suggestion that the

key task facing national decision-makers was defining the shape of a “better

peace” was that grand strategy was concerned with much more than just

supervision of battles:

Fighting power is but one of the instruments of grand strategy – which should take account of and apply the power of financial pressure, of diplomatic pressure, of commercial pressure, and, not least of ethical pressure . . . . It should not only combine the various instruments, but so regulate their use to avoid damage to the future state of peace.38

Writing in the mid-1960s, Alastair Buchan refined Hart’s concept of grand

strategy for the Cold War by making the political concerns of strategy far more

explicit. “The real content of strategy is concerned not merely with war and

battles but with the application of the maintenance of force so that it contributes

most effectively to the achievement of political objectives.”39 This emphasises the

extension of grand strategy to peace as well as wartime.40 In so doing this

definition allowed for the notion that nations might pursue fundamental interests

that do not require the actual use of military force for their realisation.

Both Hart and Buchan recognised that military victory alone was not the key

concern of grand strategy. If it left the nation weaker and vulnerable, success in

war alone could not meet the requirements of effective strategy. Hart noted:

36 Basil H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 322. 37 Ibid., 351; emphasis added. 38 Ibid., 322. 39 Alastair Buchan, War in Modern Society: An Introduction (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 81–2; emphasis added. 40 Russell Frank Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1977), xvii.

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It is essential to conduct war with constant regard to the peace you desire. This is the truth underlying Clausewitz’s definition of war as a ‘continuation of policy by other means’ – the prolongation of that policy through the war into the subsequent peace must always be borne in mind.41

Hart seemed to suggest that grand strategy is fundamentally about the creation of

an idealised vision of the world.42 Paul Kennedy went further, linking the notion

of an idealised strategic goal to the effective marshalling of the totality of the

nation’s resources:

The crux of grand strategy lies . . . in the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all the elements [of national power], both military and non-military, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, wartime and peacetime) best interests.43

By 1914 the U.S. Department of War was already distinguishing between national

strategy, which was analogous to grand strategy, and more basic military strategy.

National strategy was defined as “the art and science of developing and using the

political, economic, and psychological powers of a nation, together with its armed

forces, during peace and war, to secure national objectives,”44 whereas military

strategy was defined quite separately as “the art and science of employing the

armed forces of a nation to secure the objectives of national policy by the

application of force, or the threat of force.”45 Subsequently, however, the 2004

edition of the dictionary defined strategy more parsimoniously as “a prudent idea

or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized

and integrated fashion to achieve theatre, national, and/or multinational

objectives.”46 The distinction between peacetime and wartime is absent from the

2004 edition, as is the notion of distinct military coercive power; and, most

importantly, the objectives of the strategy seem almost to have been relegated to

an afterthought. 41 Hart, Strategy, 351. 42 A “thought picture” or Gedankenbild. See Max Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1904/1949). 43 Paul M. Kennedy, Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 5. 44 J. Boone Bartholomees and Army War College (U.S.) Strategic Studies Institute, The U.S. Army War College Guide to National Security Issues, 4th edn, 2 vols (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2010), 120–21. 45 Ibid., 121. 46 Joint Staff, J-7, Joint Publication 1–02, Department of Defense Dictionary and Associated Terms (Washington D.C.: U.S. Joint Staff, 30 November 2004), 532.

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Notwithstanding this, it would be misleading to suggest that grand strategy has

ever been a precise science. According to Clausewitz, the nature of its complexity

rendered it an art that operates at political, strategic, operational, and tactical

levels, which interact to advance the primary aim.47 Paul Kennedy shared

Clausewitz’s sense of complexity:

Given all the independent variables that come into play, grand strategy can never be exact or foreordained. It relies, rather, upon the constant and intelligent reassessment of the polity’s ends and means; it relies upon wisdom and judgement, those two intangibles which Clausewitz and Hart . . . esteemed the most.48

None of this suggests that strategy must be explicitly named as such in order to be

achieved. The temptation to look for strategic declarations solely in formal

declamatory documents is strong; however, political groups or individuals often

have a strategy even when they do not acknowledge having one. Equally,

strategies need not be the creation of a single mind. Perhaps the best example of

such ad hoc strategy, explored in depth later in this thesis, was Bill Clinton’s

strategy of enlargement.49 Strobe Talbott recalled a conversation with Clinton in

1994 in which Clinton expressed his conviction that “Roosevelt and Truman had

gotten along fine without grand strategies. They’d just made it up as they went

along, and he didn’t see why he couldn’t do the same.”50

This thesis argues that grand strategy is the cumulative expression of ideology, a

shared language of politics, including policy ideas that political actors use and

reshape. Even if Clinton thought he was improvising his grand strategy on a

pragmatic basis, his administration did articulate a central idea, ‘democratic

enlargement’, around which a national security strategy was created. As this thesis

will examine in Chapter 6, this ideological imprimatur was strongly asserted

across apparently disconnected policies. In other words, a grand strategy may well

follow a quasi-logic with assumptions so strong, so familiar, and so tacit that it is

mistaken for common sense.

47 Clausewitz, On War. 48 Kennedy, Grand Strategies in War and Peace, 6. 49 See Chapter 6. 50 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 133.

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Clausewitz’s definition conveys better than any other what Americans meant by

strategy from the inception of the republic until the First World War.51 Indeed, on

the battlefield the U.S. notion of strategy was tightly focused on the favourable

disposition of troops. Such a narrow definition of strategy, limited to military

affairs, meant that military strategists gave little consideration to their actions’

non-military consequences. Some strategic theorists suggest that America has

never really moved beyond this limited and technocratic type of strategy. For

example, Edward Luttwak stated in his analysis of American strategic thought of

the 1960s and 1970s that the American intellectual tradition entails a ‘national

style’ that includes characteristics antithetical to the very idea of strategic thought:

As a nation, Americans are pragmatic problem-solvers rather than systematic or long-range thinkers. Our whole experience tells us that it is best to narrow down complicated matters so as to isolate the practical problem at hand, and then to get on with finding a solution. Strategy by contrast is the one practical pursuit that requires a contrary method: to connect the diverse issues into a systematic pattern of things; then to craft plans – often long range – for dealing with the whole.52

Luttwak echoed the earlier critique of Hans Morgenthau, who railed against the

American Weltanschauung, a liberal refusal to recognise the political realm. In

Morgenthau’s view, the result was not only unfounded confidence in human

abilities but a trivialisation of life, “trivial optimism for which life dissolves into a

series of little hurdles which, one after the other, increasing skill cannot fail to

overcome.”53 Morgenthau was not alone in this critique of America; some current

scholars have also suggested that this problem-solving approach is irreconcilable

with truly strategic thinking and as a result most of what passes for strategic

debate in the United States does not meet the most basic definition of linking

military power to political purpose.54 Luttwak picked up on Morgenthau’s line of

reasoning and suggested the result was that so-called U.S. strategic debates such

as those in the 1970s and 1980s over the Strategic Defence Initiative or SALT II

actually had very little to do with strategy. American defence debates tended to 51 Weigley, The American Way of War, 15. 52 Edward Luttwak, On the Meaning of Victory: Essays on Strategy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 246. 53 Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 207. 54 Colin S. Gray, Strategic Studies: A Critical Assessment (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982). 5.

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“narrow down complicated matters so as to isolate the practical problem at

hand.”55 Colin Gray took the analysis further, suggesting that “each activity is

assessed on its own terms as if it had meaning in and of itself.”56 The point is that

“each problem has tended to be treated sui generis – or on its own merits.”57

Russell Weigley suggested that the effect of limited American thinking about

strategy and inconsistent involvement in international affairs meant that an

American grand strategy for the employment of force or the threat of force to

attain political ends, beyond the confines of wartime military strategy calculated

to lead to military victory, did not emerge until after the Second World War.58

This thesis argues that once a discrete American grand strategy did emerge in the

wake of the Second World War, it expanded well beyond the confines of

Clausewitz and toward Hart’s more fully developed definition:

A true grand strategy was now to do with peace as much as (perhaps even more than) war. It was about the integration of policies that should operate for decades, or even for centuries. It did not cease at war’s end, nor commence at its beginning.59

Luttwak offered an important corrective. He suggested that few nations have ever

possessed a “thought-out grand strategy” that anchored their foreign policies.60

Nevertheless, grand strategy does have interpretive value because it represents

more than just the identification of long-term national goals and the selection of

means to obtain those ends. Such a blueprint is not deterministic of specific

policies. Instead, it provides a touchstone by which policymakers chart their

action in response to events:

Both the operational environment (the world as it really is) and the psychological environment (the world as seen by conditioned and fallible human beings) – do not require that certain policies be adopted

55 Edward N. Luttwak, “On the Meaning of Strategy for the United States in the 1980s,” in National Security in the 1980s: From Weakness to Strength, ed. W. Scott Thompson (San Francisco, Calif.: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1980), 262–3. 56 Colin S. Gray, Strategic studies and Public Policy: The American Experience (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky,1982), 22. 57 Colin S. Gray, The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartland, Rimlands, and the Technological Revolution, Strategy Paper No. 30 (New York: Crane, Russak, 1977), 12. 58 Weigley, The American Way of War. 59 Paul M. Kennedy, “American Grand Strategy, Today and Tomorrow: Learning from the European Experience,” in Grand Strategies in War and Peace, ed. Paul M. Kennedy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 168. 60 Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belleknap, 1987), 178.

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but open and foreclose upon ranges of policy possibilities – which societies and their governments may pursue or not as circumstance and mood take them.61

Paul Kennedy describes this sense of grand strategy as intrinsically ideological:

It is because of the essentially political nature of grand strategy – What are this nation’s larger aims in the world, and how best can they be secured? – that there has to be such a heavy focus upon the issue of reconciling ends and means. . . . The real task for the polity in question is to ensure that, in wartime, the non-military aspects are not totally neglected . . . and that, in peacetime, the military aspects are not totally neglected. . . . [I]f the wartime task of balancing ends and means also exists in the peacetime execution of a nation’s grand strategy, there is the additional problem that politically it may be harder to achieve, year after year, since the conditions of peace conduce to turning the polity’s attention to other priorities and activities.62

The maintenance of this kind of grand strategy, requiring both wartime and

peacetime marshalling of the state’s military and civilian activities – entailing the

necessary management of both complexity of activity and political apathy –

requires a strong ideological basis. Hunt posits an ideological basis for grand

strategy “that reduces the complexities of a particular slice of reality to easily

comprehensible terms and suggests appropriate ways of dealing with that

reality.”63

With this distinction in mind, this thesis suggests that exceptionalism in the

United States is shared by individuals from differing, sometimes opposing,

political perspectives. Anders Stephanson has put such a model into practice,

suggesting how the concept of manifest destiny, which became a poeticised

rallying call, mobilised American exceptionalism as an ideological guiding

principle:

Manifest destiny did not “cause” President Polk to go to war against Mexico. No particular policy followed from this discourse as such: though certainly conducive to expansionism, it was not a strategic doctrine. . . . [M]anifest destiny is of signal importance in the way the United States came to understand itself in the world and still does: . . . [T]his understanding has determinate effects. [Manifest destiny]

61 Gray, Geopolitics, 6. 62 Kennedy, Grand Strategies in War and Peace, 168–9. 63 Michael H. Hunt, The World Transformed: 1945 to the Present (Boston, Mass.: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004), 222.

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worked in practical ways and was always institutionally embedded. . . . Not a mere rationalization, it appeared in the guise of common sense.64

This thesis agrees with Stephanson’s assessment that exceptionalism was not a

strategic doctrine in its own right but disagrees with the implication that the

‘common sense’ of American exceptionalism has had a temporally consistent

meaning. This section has suggested that grand strategy is a twentieth-century

phenomena, stemming from unprecedented ‘total wars’. Rather than just being

concerned with the fighting of battles, grand strategy concerns itself with the

achievement of an idealised ‘peace time’ world.

Methodology: Cambridge School contextualism

This thesis will employ Quentin Skinner’s Cambridge School contextualism to

overcome the proleptic misreading of history that is shared by political scientists

and those who have attempted historical surveys of exceptionalism. The standard

focus on ‘manifest destiny’ and the seeming inevitability of American

expansionist impulses that have spilled from much of the work examining the role

of exceptionalism in American grand strategy can be problematised, thereby

yielding a more nuanced recreation of the debate about America’s role in the

world and the American strategic posture.

Skinner’s main concern and theoretical contribution65 is the recreation of authorial

intention relating to the creation of texts. Skinner suggests that his approach to

texts “enables us to characterise what their authors were doing in writing them.”66

Works of political theory cannot be treated as timeless contributions to a universal

philosophical debate, nor can their meanings simply be read off as determined by

64 Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, xiv. 65 Although there is methodological discussion to be found in his own historical studies, Skinner’s most explicit methodological explorations can be found in Skinner, Visions of Politics: I; Quentin Skinner, “Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 20, no. 79 (1970); Quentin Skinner, “Hermeneutics and the Role of History,” New Literary History, 7, no. 1 (1975); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1: The Rennaissance, and vol. 2: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Quentin Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Thought and Action,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Quentin Skinner, “Rhetoric and Conceptual Change,” Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, 3 (1999). 66 Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1: xiii.

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the economic and social context in which they were written. He argues that in

order to grasp an utterance’s meaning one must first situate it within the linguistic

and intellectual context in which it arose and upon which the authors sought to

have some effect. As a result, for contextualists it is dangerous to strip texts from

their idea environments; doing so can result in a distortion or loss of a text’s

meaning.67 By concentrating on conceptual change and language’s constitutive

role in shaping a society’s normative architecture, we can reach a more

sophisticated understanding of language with respect to the reproduction of social

norms and conventions and consequently in the process of historical change.

Skinner has interrogated language’s role in moulding and determining action and

the part that political principles play in the process. He approaches the

problematic relationship between speech and praxis by switching the direction of

causation. Whatever an agent’s motive for adopting a certain course of action, that

agent must be able to justify it through reference to existing linguistic conventions

or political vocabularies.68 A society’s normative parameters are established and

reproduced through the intersubjective meanings attached to such terms.

However, these concepts are somewhat unstable; their sense and reference are

open to challenge, manipulation, and, ultimately, transformation. The essence of

conceptual change thus lies in the malleable relationship between sense and

reference over time. How this change occurs is necessarily political because it

involves conflict over meaning and action. From this argument it follows that,

once a set of principles has been employed, it establishes the parameters for

action, opening up some channels and closing others. Therefore, the choice of

legitimation vocabulary entails a form of path dependency.69

This thesis will demonstrate this point by examining the role of linguistic

intelligibility and communication in the legitimation of political and social action.

It can be shown that the constitutive role of language in shaping the normative

architecture of society is open to challenge, that the parameters are far from fixed,

but at the same time it can also be shown that there are intrinsic limits to what can

be achieved practically.

67 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 114–15. 68 Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Thought and Action,” 110. 69 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 151–5.

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The Cambridge School in practice: the methodology of contextualism

Skinner’s work builds on the approach from Wittgenstein70 that language is an

intersubjectively shared multiplicity of tools for various purposes but one in

which only some elements are open to subjective criticism and change. According

to this theory, language is so deeply woven into human action that it provides the

grounds on which criticism and change take place.71

A Skinnerian methodology revolves around three processes: (1) interpretation of

historical texts; (2) survey of ideology formation and change; and (3) analysis of

the relation between ideology and the political action it represents.72 Skinner’s

procedure comprises five steps that answer five questions:

(1) In writing a text, what was an author doing in relation to other available texts that make up the ideological context? (2) In writing a text, what was an author doing in relation to available and problematic political action that makes up the practical context? (3) How are ideologies to be identified and their formation, criticism, and change to be surveyed and explained? (4) What is the relation between political ideology and political action which best explains the diffusion of certain ideologies and what effect does this have on political behaviour? (5) What forms of political thought and action are involved in disseminating and conventionalizing ideological change?73

Step one. Drawing on the speech-act theory of John L. Austin,74 John Searle,75

and Herbert P. Grice,76 Skinner argued that if speaking and writing are viewed

pragmatically as linguistic activities, they can be seen to comprise two kinds of

action: locutionary (propositional) and, more importantly, illocutionary

(linguistic). To fully understand a text’s historical meaning, one must understand 70 Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 135–7; Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 161n; Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford:Blackwell, 1969); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953). 71 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 156–7. 72 Tully, “The Pen is a Mighty Sword,” 7. Tully has undertaken the most systematic attempt to extract Skinner’s actual method from his body of work and this section of the thesis is based on Tully’s interpretation of Skinner’s methodology. 73 Tully, “The Pen is a Mighty Sword,” 7–8. 74 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); Skinner, “Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts.” 75 John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 76 Skinner, “Hermeneutics and the Role of History,”: 209–10; H. P. Grice, “Meaning,” Philosophical Review, 66, no. 3 (1957): 377–88.

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not only its illocutionary meaning but also the author’s point (argument). To

determine locutionary meaning, one must situate the text within its linguistic or

ideological context. The context refers to the collection of texts that were written

or used during the same period, that addressed the same or similar issues, and that

shared a number of conventions.77 Skinner used the term convention heuristically

to refer to relevant linguistic commonplaces uniting a number of texts: shared

vocabulary, principles, and assumptions; and criteria for testing knowledge

claims, problems, and conceptual distinctions. This technique allows the

researcher to understand the extent to which authors accepted, endorsed,

questioned, repudiated, and ignored the prevailing assumptions and conventions

of political debate. Skinner called this the manipulation of the conventions of

available ideology.78

According to Skinner, this form of explanation is an element of a text’s historical

meaning, equivalent to the author’s intentions in writing the text. In addition, this

form of explanation is noncausal because it recharacterises the linguistic action in

terms of its ideological point, not in terms of an independently specifiable

condition.79 In short, the explanation is an intention inherent in performing the

linguistic action, not an intention that precedes performing the action. Step one

also enables the researcher to ascertain the novelty (nonconventionality) of the

text under study. This kind of understanding of a text is unavailable to those who

employ a solely textualist approach or to contextualists who ignore the linguistic

context.80

Step two. The second step is concerned with examining what the author was doing

in manipulating the ideological conventions. Where the first question asks about

the character of a text as an ideological manoeuvre, the second question is

concerned with the character of the ideological manoeuvre as a political

stratagem.81 In order to do this the text is placed within its practical context – that

is, the political activity to which the text is a response and which the author is

77 Quentin Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 261–4. 78 Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1: xiii. 79 Richter, “Pocock, Skinner and Begriffsgeschichte,”131. 80 Ibid.; Annabel Brett, “What is Intellectual History Now?” in What is History Now? ed. David Cannadine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 114. 81 Tully, “The Pen is a Mighty Sword,” 9.

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trying to change. As Skinner puts it, the political theorist is responding to the

political problems of the age. “I take it that political life itself sets the main

problems for the political theorist, causing a certain range of issues to appear

problematic and a corresponding range of questions to become the leading

subjects of debate.”82

In step two the analyst compares how the ideology’s conventions render the

relevant political action and how the manipulation of these conventions in the

given text redescribes the political action. This new characterisation will be the

key to the text’s political point. As with step one, the fact that a text makes a

political point within a practical context does not necessarily mean that the author

wrote the text in order to make that point.83

Step three. The next stage is the study of ideologies themselves. In step three, less

canonical texts of the period are surveyed to identify the constitutive and

regulative conventions of the reigning ideologies and their interrelations before

they are employed as benchmarks to judge the conventional and unconventional

aspects (and so, the ideological moves) of the major texts. Where those following

Hegel interpret the classic texts as expressing an age’s consciousness or

assumptions, Skinner’s project demonstrates that great texts are usually a poor

guide to conventional wisdom; instead, they are expressions of ideological

contestation.84

Step four. Where step two is meant to illuminate the relation between political

thought and action in the case of an individual text, step four replicates this in the

case of an ideology. Any political vocabulary will contain a number of terms that

are intersubjectively normative: in other words, they simultaneously describe and

evaluate. The terms are intersubjective in that not only the criteria for their

application (sense) and their reference but also their evaluative dimension is a

property of the words as commonly used, not something the conventional

82 Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1: xiii. 83 Tully, “The Pen is a Mighty Sword,” 11–12. 84 Ibid.

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individual user bestows on them. The evaluative dimension is known as the

speech-act potential.85

Within any society’s vocabulary the class of such descriptive/evaluative terms is

extremely large, as can be seen in the uses of terms such as democracy,

dictatorship, inefficient, irrational, objective, rational, and tolerant.86 It follows

that political vocabulary in standard use describes and evaluates political action.

Skinner suggests that by manipulating this set of terms a society establishes and

alters its moral identity.87 Using these terms in the conventional way legitimates

customary practice. Manipulating the conventions of a prevailing ideology

involves changing the conventions governing the sense, reference, or speech-act

potential of some of these normative terms. Altering the sense, reference, or

evaluative force of an ideology’s terms recharacterises or re-evaluates the political

situation they represent, legitimising a new range of activity or beliefs and

delegitimising the status quo. As a result political theories can be seen as

contemporaneous legitimation crises caused by shifting political relations, not as a

result of any choice or intention of the theorists but because the language in which

they are written characterises political relations.88

The second aspect of this step is the examination of an ideology’s constrictive and

productive effects on the conduct that the ideology legitimates. The use of

conventions dictating the prevailing normative vocabulary cannot be manipulated

indefinitely and so cannot be employed to legitimate wildly divergent practice.89

Skinner states:

Thus the problem facing an agent who wishes to legitimate what he is doing at the same time as gaining what he wants cannot simply be the instrumental problem of tailoring his normative language in order to fit his projects. It must in part be the problem of tailoring his projects in order to fit the available normative language.90

The constraint is both political and ideological. An attempt to stretch ideological

conventions requires a justification and this takes the form of grounding the

85 Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Thought and Action,” 112. 86 Tully, “The Pen is a Mighty Sword,” 13. 87 Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Thought and Action,” 112. 88 Ibid., 110–13. 89 Tully, “The Pen is a Mighty Sword,” 14. 90 Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1: xii–xiii.

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change in terms of what is already accepted as ‘common sense’. In other words,

an ideologist changes one part of an ideology by retaining and bolstering another

part of it.91 Even if an ideological innovator does not believe in the beliefs they

are expressing, they are to some extent required to conform with the established

ideological context they wish to challenge. As Skinner puts it, “[e]very

revolutionary is to this extent obliged to march backwards into battle.”92

Step five. The last step is to explain how ideological change becomes a

conventional part of the social fabric, or not. This is partly a function of how well

the innovation fits with other available schools of thought. Equally, the ability of

ideologues to control the medium of ideological propagations, such as academia,

religious institutions, and the media are key, although this does not automatically

lead to a corresponding change in practice.93

The Cambridge School and American grand strategy

At first glance, the policy documents that constituted American grand strategy do

not seem to be substantial candidates for intellectual history. However, this thesis

examines the complex, tension-ridden interface between political thought and

public policy.94 The various Cold War and post-Cold War grand strategy

documents and the world they envisioned were not the products of political

philosophers but nonetheless shared a language of politics. This language of

politics was contested and at critical junctures underwent a process of ideological

innovation.

What Skinner’s process of contextualism is able to reveal is that innovating

ideologists are less concerned with logical coherence or philosophical rigour than

they are with conceptual and practical political change. These ideological

innovators can be revealed to draw upon and shift existing discourse and present

their policies as the only viable solution to a set of self-defined political problems.

In other words, these ideologies were far from steadfast and instead were forced to

evolve to suit a specific set of situational and relational political problems;

moreover, these ideological innovators purposefully played with the conventions 91 Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Thought and Action,” 117. 92 Ibid., 112. 93 Tully, “The Pen is a Mighty Sword,” 15–16. 94 On politicians as political thinkers see Kari Palonen, “Political Theorizing as a Dimension of Political Life,” European Journal of Political Theory, 4, no. 4 (2005): 351–66.

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of ideology to legitimate and enact political change. However, as the later case

studies illustrate, their efforts to put such ambitious political visions into practice

usually faced difficult hurdles in conforming to the conventional parameters of

ideological discourse. Thus, this thesis is an exercise in the reconstruction of the

languages through which past generations conceived of the world and their

relationship to it.

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Chapter 2. Quentin Skinner’s Contextualism and International

Relations

This chapter maps Quentin Skinner’s form of contextualism onto the broader

framework of International Relations scholarship. Having traced the

methodological steps necessary for Skinnerian contextualism in the previous

chapter, this chapter proceeds to examine how realist and liberal schools of

thought in International Relations theory have approached the study of ideology

and grand strategy. The chapter lays out how both of these schools engage with

American foreign policy and suggests that they occlude certain approaches to the

study of the history of ideas and ideology. The chapter then further examines the

contributions made possible by Skinnerian contextualism by examining it in

contrast with Gramscian approaches and via a close discussion of the knowledge

claims which Skinner makes for his methodology. In conclusion, this chapter

suggests Skinnerian contextualism is able to achieve a type of analysis that other

approaches either cannot or which they attempt in problematic ways. It refines

this claim by placing Skinnerian contextualism within the broader framework of

constructivist approaches to International Relations.

Realism

Classical realist writers of the early postwar period, such as Walter Lippmann and

George Kennan,95 understood that ideological factors had a profound impact on

the grand strategies of nations. There is little in Kennan’s writing that offers a

systematic explanation of his approach to international politics or of his political

philosophy in general;96 however, textual analysis of what he did write goes some

way in revealing his underlying conservative suspicion of ideology.97 Kennan was

far from alone in pointing to the impact of liberal and idealistic political culture

precisely to condemn its impact on American foreign policy. Hans Morgenthau

and Reinhold Niebuhr took similarly disapproving stances to that of Kennan the

95 See Chapter 4 for a full assessment of both Lippmann’s and Kennan’s thought. 96 John Lukacs, George Kennan: A Study of Character (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, 2007). 97 Wilson D. Miscamble, “Kennan through His Texts.” Review of Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy by Anders Stephanson. The Review of Politics, 52, no. 2 (1990): 305–7; Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 177.

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alienated American intellectual.98 However, whilst historically rich in its analysis

and concerned with keeping the debate of ‘ideas’ as part of the political sphere,99

classical realism’s forms of analysis were skewed by its approach as an “’error

theory’ of U.S. foreign policy.”100 In other words, the normative, prescriptive

element of classical realism compromised elements of its analytic ability.

The over-emphasis on one form of anarchy (international) by realist scholars

obscured the observation that the American republic’s founding fathers were

equally as concerned with domestic anarchy between the states and specifically

sought to avoid the interstate anarchy of Europe in creating the union.101 On such

a view, any variant of realism “is insightful but radically incomplete.”102

The methodological rigour and systemic focus injected into realism by, most

prominently, Kenneth Waltz and Robert Gilpin,103 gave neorealism a very

different, positivist character to that of the classical texts of E. H. Carr, Kennan

and Morgenthau. This thesis is not trying to artificially impose uniformity

between classical realist thought, which did concern itself with both ideology and

the study of history, and Neorealism. Neorealism emphasises international

pressures by pointing to the international distribution of power, and suggests that

strategic change is shaped by material or structural pressures at the international

98 Christoph Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Illusion of World Government,” in Christian Realism and Political Problems, ed. Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Scribner, 1953); Hans, J. Morgenthau, “The Mainsprings of American Foreign Policy: The National Interest Vs. Moral Abstractions,” The American Political Science Review, 44, no. 4 (1950): 833–54; Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (New York: Knopf, 1951); Hans J. Morgenthau, American Foreign Policy: A Critical Examination (London: Methuen, 1952); Barton D. Gellman, Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power (New York: Praeger, 1984); Joel H. Rosenthal, Righteous Realists: Political Realism, Responsible Power, and American Culture in the Nuclear Age (Baton Rouge, La.,;London: Louisiana State University Press, 1991). 99 Michael C. Williams, “Why Ideas Matter in International Relations: Hans Morgenthau, Classical Realism, and the Moral Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization, 58, no. 4 (2004): 633–65. 100 Adam Quinn, US ‘: National Ideology from the Founders to the Bush Doctrine (London: Routledge, 2010), 13. 101 See Daniel Deudney, “The Philadelphian System: Sovereignty, Arms Control, and Balance of Power in the American States-Union, Circa 1787–1861,” International Organization, 49, no. 2 (1995): 191–228; Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). 102 Duncan S. A. Bell, Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 15. 103 See Robert G. Gilpin, “The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism,” International Organization, 38, no. 2 (1984): 287–304; Waltz, Theory of International Politics.

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level.104 The neorealist point of view is that the anarchic international system, in

which war is always a possibility, means that states are forced to rely upon their

own material capabilities in a game of survival. As a result, international

pressures are the primary cause of the strategic behaviour of individual states.105

Neorealists do not deny that states have their own historical and ideological

legacies but they do suggest that these domestic differences tend to be obliterated

by the pressure of international competition, and that states tend to eventually act

in the same manner, paying close attention to their relative position in the

international system and trying to promote their own power and security, as a

result becoming undifferentiated.106

Waltz himself has argued that a truly international theory cannot pretend to

explain foreign policy or grand strategy; it can only explain international

outcomes.107 It remains unclear, even to some realists, how one can have a theory

of international outcomes without making certain assumptions about the

behaviour of individual states.108 However, when Waltz argues that states balance

each other this is not simply a prediction about outcomes: it is also a prediction

about foreign-policy behaviour, whether intentional or otherwise. It is possible,

then, to sketch a realist explanation of changes in grand strategic ideas as rational

adjustments by states to changing international conditions. However, for a

neorealist the causal arrow would run from international conditions to strategic

behaviour, with ideas having little or no effect.109 Here, contemporary neorealists

split between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ varieties. For offensive realists the

competitive nature of the international system induces states to expand their

104 Alastair I. Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History, Princeton Studies in International History and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 61–154. 105 For a summary of core realist assumptions see: Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York: Norton, 1997); Gilpin, “The Richness of the Tradition”; Waltz, Theory of International Politics; Martin Wight et al., International Theory: The Three Traditions (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991). 106 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 74–7, 93–7, 127–8. 107 Ibid.,70–72, 116–28; Kenneth Neal Waltz, “International Politics Is Not Foreign Policy,” Security Studies, 6, no. 1 (1996): 54–7. 108 Colin Elman, “Horses for Courses: Why Not Neorealist Theories of Foreign Policy?” Security Studies, 6, no. 1 (1996): 7–53; G. John Ikenberry, American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays (New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1995), 1–11. 109 John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security, 19, no. 3 (1995): 5–49.

33

relative power wherever possible.110 The ‘tragedy’ of the security dilemma, to

which Mearsheimer refers,111 is the uncertainty of intention of other states, which

leads individual states to assume the worst and maximise the greatest possible

margin of safety over others. Thus powerful states act as though they seek

dominion, even if they only seek survival. Following from this, the only crucial

difference between states and the best guide to their grand strategy is their relative

power.

Offensive realists argue that rising states adopt more expansive grand strategies

because they posses the power to do so, or, as Robert Gilpin puts it, “the

redistribution of wealth and power toward a particular state in the international

system tends to stimulate the state to demand a larger bundle of welfare and

security objectives.”112

The alternative strain, defensive realism, emphasises threats to national security,

rather than the international distribution of power, as the primary motivating force

in grand strategic behaviour. What both offensive and defensive realists share is

the starting point of international conditions. Unlike their offensive cousins,

however, defensive realist do not believe that capabilities specify intentions and

instead they argue that there is a plurality of interests and intentions compatible

with any given set of capabilities.113 For defensive realists the danger and

uncertainty of the international system does not lead states to adopt worst-case

scenarios but encourages judgements based upon the reasonable probability of

threats.114

The difference between the two strands matters within the bounds of this thesis

because for defensive realists the specific interests and intentions of particular

110 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 2001), 21–2, 31–9. 111 Ibid. 112 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 23. 113 Robert Jervis, “Cooperation under Security Dilemma.” World Politics, 30, no. 2 (1978): 167–214; Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987); Charles Glaser, “The Security Dilemma Revisited,” World Politics, 50, no. 1 (1997): 171–201. 114 Stephen Brooks, “Dueling Realisms,” International Organization, 51, no. 3 (1997): 456–7.

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states cannot be left out of the analysis. In other words, defensive realism leaves a

great deal of explanatory power to domestic level factors.115

Picking up on this, Alexander Wendt has argued that realism’s weakness is its

“growing reliance on social factors to do their explanatory work [tacitly].”116

Causally, as Wendt suggests, “to get from anarchy and material forces to power

politics and war neo-realists have been forced to make additional, ad hoc

assumptions about the social structure of the international system” and its

actors.117 As a result these ad hoc assumptions may be partly successful in

producing explanatory power, but only because “the crucial causal work is done

by social, not material, factors.” This, in turn, undercuts the systemic

underpinning of neorealism.118

In recent years there has been a sustained trend for realists to insert cultural,

domestic-level, intervening variables when explaining foreign policy. Randall

Schweller has suggested that this new neoclassical realism represents the “only

game in town for [the] next and current generation of realists.”119 His claim is

disputable, as there have been attempts to reinvigorate classical realism;120

nonetheless, a wide array of next-generation realists belong to the neoclassical

realist school.121

115 Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton, N.J.; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1998), 25–31. 116 Alexander E. Wendt, “Constructing International-Politics,” International Security, 20, no. 1 (1995): 79. 117 Ibid., 80. 118 Ibid. 119 Randall L. Schweller, “The Progressiveness of Neoclassical Realism.” in Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field, ed. Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 344–5. 120 Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), is the prime example. His attempt to fuse classical realism with ancient Greek notions of tragedy is flawed because these Greek ideals are portrayed as timeless values which remain unchanging explanatory concepts. This is a notion of ideational rigidity this thesis seeks to challenge. 121 See Thomas J. Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947–1958, Princeton Studies in International History and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton, N.J.; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2006); Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy, Princeton Studies in International History and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006); Randall L. Schweller, Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler’s Strategy of World Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Stephen M.

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These scholars take their moniker from Gideon Rose’s polemic which described

their attempt to synthesise the wide-ranging insights of classical realism with the

structural imperatives of neorealism in a theory which:

explicitly incorporates both external and internal variables, updating and systematizing certain insights drawn from classical realist thought. Its adherents argue that the scope and ambition of a country’s foreign policy is driven first and foremost by its place in the international system and specifically by its relative material power capabilities. This is why they are realist. They argue further, however, that the impact of such power capabilities on foreign policy is indirect and complex, because systemic pressures must be translated through intervening variables at the unit level.122

In other words, neoclassical realists still privilege material structural factors but

try to take into account historical and ideological domestic factors.123 As one

recent defender of neoclassical realism admitted:

For structural realists to make use of domestic politics and ideas, they have to serve the purposes of validating the central premises of structural realism: anarchy is a real force, not totally constraining, but one that cannot be ignored without severe consequences. This is in fact what neoclassical realism does. If it did anything less, we could not distinguish it from liberalism and, in many instances, constructivism.124

Neoclassical realism manages to sneak into structural analysis – hitherto only

concerned with the anarchical nature of the system and the distribution of relative

capabilities – a number of additional variables, chiefly the domestic politics of the

state or the perceptions of the decision-making elite, or both.125 Neoclassical

realists thus claim to achieve a synthesis between the rich insights of classical

realists and the theoretical parsimony of their neorealist forebears.

Walt, Revolution and War, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); William Curti Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions During the Cold War, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Zakaria, From Wealth to Power. 122 Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics, 51, no. 1 (1998): 146. 123 Schweller, “The Progressiveness of Neoclassical Realism.” 124 Brian Rathbun, “A Rose by Any Other Name: Neoclassical Realism as the Logical and Necessary Extension of Structural Realism,” Security Studies, 17, no. 2 (2008): 311. 125 The actual intervening variable varies considerably from scholar to scholar. For Wohlforth it is misperception, for Zakaria domestic politics; for Layne it is ideology and for Dueck domestic politics and strategic culture.

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Contra Waltz, neoclassical realists are putting forward a theory of foreign

policy.126 Against Waltz’s systemic view, a unit-based theory of foreign policy

seeks to account not for similarity but for differences between states in their

behaviour and “explains why different states or the same state at different

historical moments, have different intentions, goals and preferences towards the

outside world.”127 This thesis would support this goal but expresses concern with

the ability of neoclassical realism to achieve it in the face of its inherent

contradictions. Furthermore, neoclassical realism shares the same approach to

history as neorealism, which this thesis is trying to move beyond.

Neoclassical realism suffers from the same theoretical indeterminacy as defensive

realism.128 Quite apart from the fact that neoclassical realism is so all-

encompassing that it is hard to falsify, some have claimed that it has borrowed

from so many International Relations theories that it is hard to say what is

uniquely realist about it.129 This thesis suggests that the ultimate privilege

accorded to systemic factors over the long term makes neoclassical realism

essentially a variant of neorealism:

For neoclassical realism to be confirmed, it is not enough to point to the influence of intervening variables such as domestic politics or misperception, or both, in order to account for behaviour that is anomalous from a systemic point of view. One must also show the system reasserting itself and emerging victorious in the end.130

Thus neoclassical realism is unable to escape from the straightjacket of its own

logic and deliver a theory of foreign policy, since it “cannot explain convincingly

why states act differently starting from the premise that all states will have to act

in the same way in the end.”131

This thesis is not arguing that neo and neoclassical realism are ahistorical, as that

is not the case;132 however, it is concerned with rectifying the type of historical

analysis which systemic theories of international relations use. Neorealism does 126 Zakira, From Wealth to Power, 13–14. 127 Ibid. 128 Legro and Moravcsik, “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” 27–8. 129 Ibid. 130 David G. Haglund and Tudor Onea. “Sympathy for the Devil: Myths of Neoclassical Realism in Canadian Foreign Policy,” Canadian Foreign Policy, 14, no. 2 (2008): 59. 131 Ibid., 60. 132 John M. Hobson, and George Lawson, “What Is History in International Relations?” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 37, no. 2 (2008): 415–35.

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utilise history and can explain systemic change over time,133 but the type of

history which both neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism share is that which

provides a grand narrative that can establish universalist propositions,134 and, as

Lawson and Hobson suggest, this is “history without historicism.”135 This type of

history produces what it is required to produce: lessons and rules that can inform

policy-makers and support research hypotheses.136

This type of historical inquiry is shared by but has not been confined to the ‘neo-

neo’ schools of International Relations scholarship. It has also permeated the

work of some prominent members of the post-revisionist school of diplomatic

history and its study of American grand strategy, despite their associated claim to

a more dispassionate assessment of the sources.137 When viewed from a

perspective which privileges ideology, neorealism and some post-revisionist

diplomatic historians have effectively served to remove the study of ideology

from the history of policymaking by making ‘national security’ or the ‘national

interest’ into a seemingly neutral explanatory device.

Despite John Lewis Gaddis having repudiated neorealism in the 1990s,

neorealism’s logic is still evident in his138 more recent work, where he states that

“[w]hen a power vacuum separates great powers . . . they are unlikely to fill it

without bumping up against and bruising each other’s interests.”139 There is also a

problem with the way Gaddis deploys his variant of realist logic on occasions

where the U.S. committed actions that violated its proclaimed principles: in other

words, Gaddis uses systemic pressure as an explanatory ‘escape clause’. As a

result, the combination of neorealism and moralism he deploys is incoherent.140

Melvyn Leffler shares Gaddis’s indeterminacy; for Leffler, American foreign

133 Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics. 134 Edgar Kiser, and Michael Hechter, “The Debate on Historical Sociology: Rational Choice Theory and Its Critics,” American Journal of Sociology, 104, no. 3 (1998): 785–816. 135 Hobson and Lawson, “What Is History in International Relations?” 423. 136 Ibid. 137 Anders Stephanson, “Ideology and Neorealist Mirrors – Commentary,” Diplomatic History, 17, no. 2 (1993): 285–95. 138 Gaddis occupies a similar position of centrality within the field of American Cold War Diplomatic History (even if only in a negative sense for some scholars) as Kenneth Waltz does within International Relations. 139 Gaddis, We Now Know, 11. 140 Ibid.,157.

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policy is a product of the interaction of external threats and internal core values.141

The problem with both Gaddis’s and Leffler’s essentially neoclassical realist

framework is that, while they recognise the significance of the domestic sphere to

explaining American foreign policy in principle, they neglect to develop that

insight in a systematic fashion. Leffler does talk about the ‘core values’ which

U.S. policy makers sought to defend – democracy, the free market, the American

way of life – but there is little discussion of the meaning of these values or how

they came to dominate the view of the U.S. government. They are accepted in a

unproblematic way and are treated as static and unchanging; a retrospective

ideological coherence is applied.142 Further, these ideas are transmitted into grand

strategy as the desire to simply protect these values by the maintenance of a

balance of power favourable to the U.S. So, whilst ostensibly including the

internal processes in the explanatory framework, Leffler actually reduces them to

considerations of policy-makers about how to respond to external ‘threats’ in

order to create a favourable balance of power.

What this reflects is that, for the two leading post-revisionist diplomatic

historians, the core values that the U.S. sought to defend were both self-evident

and universal – a hostility to authoritarianism and a benevolent Wilsonian desire

to spread democracy and capitalism which are traduced to a consensual

banality.143 This approach ostensibly gives more credence to ideological factors;

however, it stumbles when actually doing so. ‘Core values’ becomes an umbrella

term for all ideas or interests of policy-makers without providing guidance as to

how they are to be identified. The implicit logic is that systemic causes are

primary but occasionally domestic factors interfere, and that is usually where

systemic explanations fail to provide satisfactory answers.144

Liberalism

Liberalism starts with a different sense of the “state of nature” metaphor to

realists, which seems to owe more to Locke than to Hobbes, where far more

141 Melvyn Leffler, “National Security,” The Journal of American History, 77, no. 1 (1990): 143–52; Leffler, Preponderance of Power. 142 Ibid. 143 Gaddis, We Now Know, 283; Leffler, “National Security,” 144–5. 144 Benjamin O. Fordham, Building the Cold War Consensus: The Political Economy of U.S. National Security Policy, 1949–51 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 16.

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cooperation is possible in the anarchic international system.145 Starting in the

1970s, Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye re-engaged with liberalism as a response

to realism.146 What this work and those it inspired147 shared was a recognition

that, over the course of several hundred years, state behaviour no longer

resembled its Westphalian ‘ideal type’.148

Neorealist and neoliberal international relations theorists, though pursuing

different arguments, are underpinned by a similar, though not identical, set of

assumptions. Neoliberals distanced themselves from the classical liberalist

framework, adopted some of neorealism’s theoretical rigour in the late 1970s, and

took hold of some neorealist assumptions in order to restore integrity to liberal

ideals.149 The core similarities between the two schools stem from the three basic

tenants that were taken from neorealism. First, states are ‘rational egoists’;

second, it is the prospect of conflict that dictates relations between states; and,

third, the states are the primary actors in international relations.150 It was from this

common basis that Robert Keohane sought to challenge neorealism, albeit from a

common ontological, epistemological, and methodological basis.151

In the neoliberal conception states still pursue survival as an objective and are

rational actors; however, their survival is more broadly defined than simply the

maximisation of power. This shifts some of the causal weight for state behaviour

away from structural conditions towards domestic political institutions. In

addition, the liberal conception of actor rationality suggests that states might be

willing to forego competition in favour of greater gain if they can reduce the fear

that other states might forego international agreements through international

145 Janeen M. Klinger, “International Relations Theory and American Grand Strategy,” in The U.S. Army War College Guide to National Security Issues, ed. J. Boone Bartholomees (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2010), 141. 146 Keohane and Nye, Transnational Relations and World Politics; Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). 147 Edward L. Morse, Modernization and the Transformation of International Relations, Perspectives on Modernization (New York: Free Press, 1976). 148 Ibid. 149 John M. Hobson, The State and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 150 Ibid.; Keohane, After Hegemony. 151 Martin Hewson and Roger Tooze, “The after-Shock of the ‘Neo’ Agendas of IPE and IR,” Review of Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, by Stephen Gill, and Transcending the State-Global Divide: A Neostructuralist Agenda in International Relations, ed. Ronen P. Palan and Barry Gills, Review of International Political Economy, 3, no. 1 (1996): 200.

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institutions.152 Corollaries to this are the ideas of republican liberalism, a

resurrection of Kantian153 observations that democracies tend not to fight each

other. It was Michael Doyle who expanded these claims to suggest that the nature

of the domestic political system had an impact upon the international behaviour of

states.154 Republican liberalism goes further and stresses that democracies hold

common moral values which lead to what Kant suggested was a “pacific union”155

– not a formal peace treaty, but rather a zone of peace based on the communality

of the moral system shared by democracies.

The neoliberal analysis of U.S. grand strategy after the Cold War, in both an

analytic and a prescriptive sense, has been concerned with the promotion of an

‘Americanised’ international order characterised by the spread of democracy and

‘free market’ capitalism but based upon strong multilateral organisations.156

However, the most historically orientated example of this viewpoint is found in

the work of G. John Ikenberry.157 In a title which plays on Keohane’s After

Hegemony,158 Ikenberry suggested that after the Second World War America, as

victor, sought to transform the international system through the establishment of

international organisations.159 The shared grounding with realists in the notion of

152 Robert O. Keohane, International Institutions and State Power: Essays in International Relations Theory (Boulder, Colo.; London: Westview Press, 1989), 2; Joseph S. Nye, Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 38; Robert O. Keohane, Joseph S. Nye, and Stanley Hoffmann (eds), After the Cold War: International Institutions and State Strategies in Europe, 1989–1991: Conference: Papers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 153 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, trans. and ed. Mary Campebell Smith (New York; London: Garland, 1972). 154 Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign-Affairs. Part 1,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 12, no. 3 (1983): 205–35; Michael W. Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign-Affairs. Part 2,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 12, no. 4 (1983): 323–53; Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and World-Politics,” American Political Science Review, 80, no. 4 (1986): 1151–69. 155 Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay. 156 See Graham T. Allison and Gregory Treverton, Rethinking America’s Security: Beyond Cold War to New World Order (New York: W. W.Norton, 1992); David Callahan, Between Two Worlds: Realism, Idealism, and American Foreign Policy after the Cold War (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994); Joseph S. Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); John Gerard Ruggie, Winning the Peace: America and World Order in the New Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 157 See G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: Essays on American Power and World Politics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); G. John Ikenberry, American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays (New York; London: Georgetown University, 2005); G. John Ikenberry, America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Ithaca, N.Y., London: Cornell University Press, 2002); G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). 158 Keohane, After Hegemony. 159 Ikenberry, After Victory, 5–6.

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power is key. America was able to pursue this project based upon material

hegemonic capability. However, what distinguishes Ikenberry’s position from that

of neorealism was the emphasis he placed upon the character of American

democracy:

It was the exercise of strategic restraint – made good by an open polity and binding institutions – more than the direct and instrumental exercise of hegemonic domination that ensured a cooperative and stable postwar order.160

There are striking similarities between Ikenberry’s account of American postwar

grand strategy and the narrative of American history from some ‘orthodox’

diplomatic historians161 who dominated the historiography of the Cold War until

the 1960s.162 In such accounts, the United States entered the war in order to build

a peace based on democracy and prosperity for all under the Atlantic Charter. The

Charter represented a combination of American ideals and the principles of

Wilsonian internationalism.163 Once victory had been achieved, postwar

arrangements were to be institutionalised through new collective security

organisations designed to maintain the peace.164 The orthodox accounts are

imbued with a normative commitment to the virtuous nature of American policies

and there is a marked absence of overt methodological commitments or reflection.

This thesis does not rigidly impose a taxonomic link between the schools of

International Relations theory and particular waves of diplomatic history; the two

do not map onto each other neatly enough to do so. Nonetheless, there is heuristic

purpose in the partial overlay pursued in this chapter. Both neoliberalism and 160 G. John Ikenberry, “Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Persistence of American Postwar Order,” International Security, 23, no. 3 (1998): 44; emphasis added. 161 See the following for a representative, though by no means exhaustive, selection of orthodox or “traditional” accounts of U.S. diplomatic history. Thomas Andrew Bailey, America Faces Russia; Russian–American Relations from Early Times to Our Day (Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1964); Samuel Flagg Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1936); Samuel Flagg Bemis, The United States as a World Power: A Diplomatic History, 1900–1955 (New York: Holt, 1955); Samuel Flagg Bemis, American Foreign Policy and the Blessings of Liberty, and Other Essays (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962); Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin; Dexter Perkins, The American Approach to Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952). 162 This thesis does not mean to suggest simple historical ‘progression’ between orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist accounts of U.S. diplomatic history. Even the supposed post-revisionism of Gaddis’s We Now Know has strong similarities with the implicit narrative of orthodoxy, even if Gaddis suggests his ‘new’ approach is methodologically superior. 163 Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, 20–22. 164 William Hardy McNeill, America, Britain, & Russia: Their Co-Operation and Conflict, 1941–1946 (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 30.

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neorealism share a particular approach to history that seeks to construct a grand

narrative for the purposes of theory building or testing.165

Such an approach to history occludes the study of ideology as social practice. As a

result it precludes studies that seek to understand how American policy-makers

viewed their place in the world and how such views were contested or reproduced

over time. Neorealism may yield insight into the “endogenous logic of relations of

force,” but it is too reductionist to yield insight into “social epistemology.”166 This

thesis contends that texts do not yield meaning in a straightforward fashion and

the idea of fundamentally timeless concepts such as ‘international anarchy’ or ‘the

balance of power’ based upon stable vocabularies is useful for little other than

theory creation and testing. In its place this thesis adopts “a willingness to

emphasise the local and the contingent, a desire to underline the extent to which

our own concepts and attitude have been shaped by particular historical

circumstances.”167 As a result this theory avoids the transplanting of concepts and

viewpoints across time and between different historical actors and in so doing

avoids the imposition of a retrospective “mythology of coherence”168 into

understandings of American exceptionalism at different points in time.

Neo-Gramscian169 International Relations

Robert Cox is credited with having introduced International Relations scholars to

the work of the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci.170 Not only did Cox offer an

alternative to the ‘neo-neo’ dominance within International Relations but he

suggested a new conception of hegemony at the international level. This thesis

explores Gramscian thought because it provides an alternative way of theorising

about ideology at both the domestic and international level and, like Skinnerian

165 For an account of the use of history in International Relations theory see George Lawson, “The Eternal Divide? History and International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations, (2010), 4–8. 166 John Gerard Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalisation (London: Routledge, 1998), 193. 167 Quentin Skinner, The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 12. 168 Lawson, “The Eternal Divide?” 14. 169 This thesis differentiates between ‘Gramscian’ theories about the state at a domestic level and ‘Neo-gramscian’ theories in International Relations, which are explicitly concerned with international hegemony. 170 Robert Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 12 (1983): 162–75.

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contextualism, it is focused on conceptual change and conflict (albeit with some

important differences). In short, it seeks “to explain the way in which dominant

ideas about world order help to sustain particular patterns of relations among

material forces, ideas and institutions at a global level.”171 The appeal of Gramsci

to International Relations scholars is that:

[H]is work provides an ontological and epistemological foundation upon which to construct a non-deterministic yet structurally grounded explanation of change . . . By insisting on the transformative capacity of human beings, Gramsci’s radical embrace of human subjectivity provides IR scholars with one way of avoiding a deterministic and ahistorical structuralism.172

However, the utility of exploring Gramsci for this thesis is that his reconfiguration

of the concept of base and superstructure and avoidance of a teleological,

deterministic reading of Marx did not engage in economic reductionism. Instead

his theories were concerned with culture, identity, and hegemony.173 Via Gramsci,

Cox brought this idea of ‘hegemony’ into International Relations theory,

specifically problematising the conception of power. As a result, hegemony at a

global level cannot simply be equated with military force or economic might. Cox

reasserted Gramsci’s insight that the power of a ruling glass was exercised not

simply by coercion but also through the capacity to gain the consent of the people,

to make the questioning of certain key ideas beyond consideration and instead

accepted as ‘common sense’.174 Although Cox meant to deploy Gramsci at an

international level to describe hegemonic world order, this thesis is more

interested in Cox’s critique of International Relations theory and more concerned

with Gramsci’s own work, rather than Cox’s international reformulation of it.175

Gramsci’s ‘war of position’ has some conceptual similarity to Skinner’s model of

171 Martin Griffiths, “Robert Cox,” in Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, ed.Martin Griffiths (London: Routledge, 1999), 116. 172 Randall D. Germain and Michael Kenny, “Engaging Gramsci: International Relations Theory and the New Gramscians,” Review of International Studies, 24, no. 1 (1998): 5. 173 Griffiths, “Robert Cox,” 116; Martin Griffiths et al., “Antonio Gramsci,” in Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, ed. Martin Griffiths et al. (London: Routledge, 2009), 189. 174 Robert Cox, “Labour and Hegemony,” International Organization, 31 (1977): 387; Griffiths et al., “Antonio Gramsci,” 116. 175 There has been heated debate about whether Cox (and those who rely on him for their understanding of Gramsci) misinterpreted Gramsci: see Germain and Kenny, “Engaging Gramsci,” and the response, Mark Rupert, “(Re-)Engaging Gramsci: A Response to Germain and Kenny,” Review of International Studies, 24, no. 3 (1998): 427–34.

44

ideological innovation in that it required intellectuals176 (similar to Skinner’s

‘innovating ideologists’) to start the war of position by basing their arguments in

the ‘common sense’ of hegemony.177

Cox picked up on these features to develop a historical approach capable of

recognising historical change and contestation. In so doing he made the point that

critical theories challenge the problem-solving theories such as neorealism and

neoliberalism by calling into question the fixed order that such theories take as

their starting point.178 While class struggle or other factors can be placed within

such an approach, they become simply “one analytical lens, not a privileged

one”179 and it “does not take institutions and social and power relations for

granted but calls them into question by concerning itself with their origins and

whether they might be in the process of changing.”180

Neo-Gramscian thought is often associated with studies of International Political

Economy and has examined the assertion of American (economic) hegemony

through international institutions.181 Such an approach differs from this thesis’s

concentration on the domestic level and focus on grand strategy. However, a

number of scholars of American foreign policy have been inspired by Gramscian

approaches.182 These studies are largely polarised, with the majority focusing on

176 Gramsci’s differentiation between ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ intellectuals is beyond the scope of this thesis but in this context it refers to those intellectuals who seek counter hegemony. 177 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996), 330–31. 178 Robert Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10, no. 2 (1981): 129. 179 John S. Moolakkattuu, “Robert W. Cox and Critical Theory of International Relations,” International Studies, 46, no. 4 (2009): 441. 180 Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders,” 129. 181 For example, Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge Studies in International Relations (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 182 See Jeff Bridoux, “Postwar Reconstruction, the Reverse Course and the New Way Forward: Bis Repetitas?” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 5, no. 1 (2011): 43–66; Toby Dodge, “The Sardinian, the Texan and the Tikriti: Gramsci, the Comparative Autonomy of the Middle Eastern State and Regime Change in Iraq” International Politics, 43 (2006): 453–73; Toby Dodge, “Coming Face to Face with Bloody Reality: Liberal Common Sense and the Ideological Failure of the Bush Doctrine in Iraq,” International Politics, 46, no. 2–3 (2009): 253–75; Toby Dodge, “The Ideological Roots of Failure: The Application of Kinetic Neo-Liberalism to Iraq,” International Affairs, 86, no. 6 (2010): 1269–86; Daniel Egan, “Globalization and the Invasion of Iraq,” in The Routledge Handbook of War and Society: Iraq and Afghanistan, ed. Steven Carlton-Ford and Morten G. Ender (London; New York: Routledge, 2011); Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The U.S. Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945–56 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Scott Lucas, “Beyond Freedom, Beyond Control, Beyond the Cold War: Approaches to American Culture and the State-Private Network,” Intelligence & National Security, 18, no. 2 (2003): 53–72; Inderjeet Parmar, “‘Mobilizing America for an Internationalist Foreign Policy’: The Role of the

45

the earlier periods of what became known as the Cold War and the rest on the

American invasion of Iraq in 2003. In other words, they focus almost exclusively

on moments of American assertion of hegemony. Most of these Gramscian

studies examine the interaction between state and civil society183 in functionally

creating hegemonies and counter hegemonies184 and, as a result, there is an

underlying materialist bias to these studies, rather than a sustained focus on the

content of the ideologies.185

This thesis has more in common with the ideologically orientated studies which

have taken the Gramscian notion of ‘common sense’ amongst the civil–military

American elite as a starting point and have then sought to disentangle what

‘common sense’ meant at that particular moment.186 It shares a commitment to the

Gramscian discovery of norms and practices, which can be seen as consistent with

Skinnerian ideology and practical context. Equally, in adopting Skinnerian

contextualism this thesis shares with Gramscians the notion of historically

specific conceptions of the world as responses to specific problems.187 Where this

thesis overlaps empirically with the Gramscian scholarship, particularly in its

analysis of the Bush Doctrine, there is considerable congruence. However, this

Council on Foreign Relations,” Studies in American Political Development, 13, no. 2 (1999): 337–73; Inderjeet Parmar, “‘To Relate Knowledge and Action’: The Impact of the Rockefeller Foundation on Foreign Policy Thinking During America’s Rise to Globalism 1939–1945,” Minerva, 40, no. 3 (2002): 235–63; Inderjeet Parmar, “Anglo-American Elites in the Interwar Years: Idealism and Power in the Intellectual Roots of Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations,” International Relations, 16, no. 1 (2002): 53–75; Inderjeet Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy: A Comparative Study of the Role and Influence of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and Post-war American Hegemony (London; New York: Routledge, 2002); Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam, The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–1960 (London: Frank Cass, 2003); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999). 183 These studies focus on the interaction between government and extra and quasi-governmental groups such as think tanks and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. 184 Bridoux, “Postwar Reconstruction”; Lucas, Freedom’s War; “Beyond Freedom, Beyond Control”; Parmar, “‘Mobilizing America for an Internationalist Foreign Policy’”; “Anglo-American Elites in the Interwar Years”; “‘To Relate Knowledge and Action’”; Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy; Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?. 185 For example, Egan, “Globalization and the Invasion of Iraq,” 192, uses the term ‘neoliberalism’ simply as a representation of class-based agency rather than a term in need of further analysis. 186 Dodge, “‘The Sardinian, the Texan and the Tikriti”; “Coming Face to Face with Bloody Reality”; “The Ideological Roots of Failure”. 187 Joseph V. Femia, “An Historicist Critique of ‘Revisionist’ Methods for Studying the History of Ideas,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 163.

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thesis focuses primarily on ideological contestation and change, which is similar

to (but not synonymous with) the ‘war of position’ in Gramscian terms. The

difference is that this thesis is concerned with an intra-elite form of ideological

contestation, not the seeds of proletarian revolution of which the ‘war of position’

was an integral part.

This difference is not surprising. Where Gramsci was motivated by activism,

Skinner is concerned with perfecting historical method,188 and pursues a different

project as a result. This is an important difference between the Gramscian

approach and Skinnerian contextualism. Gramscian analysis engages with history

to ‘shed light on’ the present condition; it is based on a “philosophy of praxis.”189

In Cox’s famous phrase, “[t]heory is always for someone and for some

purpose.”190 Cox’s statement does not just reveal what he perceived as

deficiencies within then-dominant approaches in International Relations theory; it

also reveals the core of the Gramscian project. As Gramsci elucidated his own

commitment to the ‘philosophy of praxis’:191

The real philosopher is, and cannot be other than, the politician, the active man who modifies the environment, understanding by environment the ensemble of relations which each of us enters to take part in. If one’s own individuality means to acquire consciousness of these relations and to modify one’s own personality means to modify the ensemble of these relations.192

As a result, Gramscian analysis of hegemony and ‘common sense’ is concerned

with disrupting the translation and transmission of political and philosophical

ideas for mass consumption. This translates into the Gramscian scholarship of

American strategic thought. For instance, Dodge is concerned with “the influence

that Neo-Liberalism and its cousin Neo-Conservatism had on the Common Sense

188 See Chapter 1 of this thesis for an explication of Skinner’s methodology and this chapter for analysis of his knowledge claims. 189 Gramsci used the term “The philosophy of praxis’; see Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 319. 190 Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders,” 128. 191 Some studies of Gramsci have suggested that his use of the term ‘philosophy of praxis’ was simply intended to disguise his references to Marxism; this thesis does not share such a limited interpretation. See Sue Golding, Gramsci’s Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Democracy (Toronto, Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 145 [note 3]. 192 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 352; emphasis added.

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decision-making of American government functionaries on the ground in

Baghdad.”193

Margaret Leslie’s and Joseph Femia’s critiques of Skinner reveal much of the

difference between his project and Gramsci’s.194 In attacking contextualism they

suggest that ‘anachronistic’ readings and strained analogies may, in the hands of

gifted thinkers such as Gramsci, prove to be politically persuasive. In his study of

Machiavelli, Gramsci suggested that the Communist Party was a modern

Principe, making use of what he interpreted to be Machiavelli’s notion of an all-

powerful Principe.195 By substituting ‘party’ for Principe, Gramsci was able to

adapt his reading of Machiavelli’s argument to his own (very different) context.

Gramsci’s use of Machiavelli would, by Skinner’s judgement, be anachronistic,

but for Gramsci as a political actor it served a very specific purpose. Skinner

grants no such licence to scholars of political thought and his riposte to Gramsci,

Leslie, and Femia would probably be that Gramsci’s notion of ‘political party’

was simply not available to Machiavelli. In Skinner’s terminology, Gramsci

would be categorised as an ‘innovating ideologist’.

This thesis is not advocating a ‘philosophy of praxis’; instead, it is concerned with

archaeological196 reconstruction of how human collectivities organise and

constitute themselves and how they construct and impose an understanding of that

process. As one reviewer woefully commented of Skinner, “if theoretical

manoeuvres are political in that they are directed at an ‘audience to be moved,’ in

what direction is Skinner’s audience encouraged to move?”197 Skinner provides

no such answer. In contrast, for Gramsci scholarship and activism remain

193 Dodge, “Coming Face to Face with Bloody Reality,” 258; emphasis added. 194 Leslie, Margaret, “In Defence of Anachronism,” Political Studies, 18, no. 4 (1970): 433–47; Femia, “An Historicist Critique”. 195 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 147–8. (Gramsci’s exact term is “totalitarian” parties but his usage seems to suggest he is referring to the Communist party. It does not seem to be disparaging and the translators say they have translated it as meaning ‘global’ elsewhere); see footnote 33, 147. 196 The term is from Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. and ed. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972); although sharing some of Foucault’s early insight, Skinner’s project ultimately follows a different path. See later in this chapter for an assessment of Skinner’s knowledge claims and where this positions him in the post-positivist spectrum. 197 Amit Ron, Review of Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric by Kari Palonen. Constellations 14, no. 1 (2007): 152.

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indivisible and the very idea of political neutrality is impossible.198 Gramscian

thought would deny Skinner the epistemic privilege of even attempting to reduce

the impact of contemporary subjectivity,199 regardless of his method.

Quentin Skinner’s project and the linguistic turn

The inability to establish direct causation between ‘culture’ and ‘behaviour’ –

‘once so easily lined up on either side of the great Cartesian divide’200 – has

directed more critical scholars dealing with culture and ideology to the concept of

discourse. As stated by R. B. J. Walker, terms such as discourse are “used to

suggest a more complex and mutually constitutive interplay of phenomena”

(consciousness and matter). They:

stress the way seemingly abstract ideas and seemingly concrete processes converge in texts and institutions. . . . Those now working with culture are now likely to refer to “cultural practices” . . . that are embodied in all forms of social activity.201

Walker points to language’s role in the construction of social life, the ‘linguistic

turn’ long ignored by the positivist mainstream of academic international

relations.

Post-structuralists, some feminists, and many constructivists have seized on the

possibilities that such an approach offers.202 The rise of Critical Theory203 and

post-positivist orientations204 in the field of international relations has manifested

198 Femia, “An Historicist Critique,” 169–70. 199 Stephen Gill, “Epistemology, Ontology and the ‘Italian School” in Historical Materialism and International Relations, Ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 24–5. 200 R. B. J. Walker, “The Concept of Culture in the Theory of International Relations,” in Culture and International Relations, ed. Jongsuk Chay (New York: Praeger, 1990), 5. 201 Ibid. 202 See Emanuel Adler, “Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics,” European Journal of International Relations, 3, no. 3 (1997): 319–63; Daniel M. Green, Constructivism and Comparative Politics (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002); Ted Hopf, “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory,” International Security, 23, no. 1 (1998): 171–200; Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2007). 203 Meant in this instance in the sense of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and its heirs. For an overview see David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1980), and for Critical Theory in International Relations see Richard Wyn Jones, Critical Theory and World Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001). 204 See Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (New York; London: Columbia University Press, 1992) for an overview of the projects of Critical Theory and post-positivism and their relationship to International Relations theory; see also Richard Price and

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in various ways, but many scholars have taken an interest in the language of

international politics as the discipline of international relations takes its own

linguistic turn.205 Reflecting varying epistemological commitments, these theories

have been inspired by different traditions, such as the universal pragmatics of

Habermas,206 the ordinary language analysis of Wittgenstein and Austin,207 and

the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer.208

Nonetheless, it often seems that scholars of international relations have remained

oblivious to the methodological revolution that has taken place since the 1960s

within the study of the history of political thought. This revolution has been

spearheaded by Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and J. G. A. Pocock, the so-called

Cambridge School.209 Although the Cambridge School remains controversial and

its members are not as unified in their approach as their soubriquet suggests,210

they do share the notion that consideration of a text’s linguistic context211 is

necessary and perhaps sufficient for understanding that text. The methodological

battle that their work has triggered has resulted in improved approaches to

recovering the meaning of texts.212

Christian Reus-Smit, “Dangerous Liaisons? Critical International Theory and Constructivism,” European Journal of International Relations, 4, no. 3 (1998): 259–94. 205 Duncan S. A. Bell, “International Relations: The Dawn of a Historiographical Turn?” British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3, no. 1 (2001): 115–26. 206 Jürgen Habermas, “Some Distinctions in Universal Pragmatics – Working Paper,” Theory and Society, 3, no. 2 (1976), 155–67. 207 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953); Austin, How to do things with Words; Skinner, “Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts.” 208 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London; New York: Continuum Impacts, 1993), 383–491; Martin Jay, “Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn? Reflections on the Habermas-Gadamer Debate,” in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan (Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell University Press, 1982), 86–110. 209 Richard Tuck, “History of Political Thought,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 100–130. 210 Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 211 Ibid.; For a useful discussion of the meaning of ‘context’ and historical contextualism in particular, see Stephanie Lawson, “Political Studies and the Contextual Turn: A Methodological/Normative Critique,” Political Studies, 56 (2008), 588–92. 212 David Armitage, British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2–3.

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Given the ‘fifty years’ rift’213 between International Relations and the discipline

of history, it is not surprising that the field of International Relations has

overlooked the Cambridge School, divided as they are by a common language. As

the history of diplomatic archives moved from the margins, the field of

international relations became more theoretical and positivistic. The two

disciplines’ methods and aspirations increasingly diverged. This had not always

been the case. From Thucydides to Ranke, the main concern of historical writing

had been topics that would become the locus of study for international relations:

war and peace, diplomacy and law, sovereignty and the state. As David Armitage

notes, the separation of the disciplines has occurred within the last fifty years or

so.214 The result within international relations has been the emergence of two

forms of ahistoricism, “history as scripture and as butterfly.”215 Positivists have

tended to pursue the scripture approach, in which history becomes “a

predetermined site for the empirical verification of abstract claims.”216 In pursuing

the butterfly approach, post-positivists have reduced historical inquiry to the

identification of “contingent hiccups,” the identification of which is instrumental

in uncovering “power–knowledge nexuses.”217 Barry Buzan and Richard Little

went further in identifying in International Relations “the prevalence of a-

historical, even anti historical, attitudes in formulating the concept of an

international system” to explain why “International Relations has failed as an

intellectual project” and can be rescued only by a return to history.218

It is strange, then, that as a discipline International Relations has not been more

responsive to the critique of intellectual history which the disparate members of

the Cambridge School started in the 1960s. They were responding to the same

types of concern that Buzan and Little would identify as undermining the field of

International Relations forty years later. The Cambridge School thinkers did not

conceptualise intellectual history as distinct from political theory, which would

213 David Armitage, “The Fifty Years’ Rift: Intellectual History and International Relations,” Modern Intellectual History, 1, no. 1 (2004), 97. 214 Armitage, “Fifty Years’ Rift.” 215 Lawson, “The Eternal Divide?” 3. 216 Ibid., 2–3. 217 Ibid., 5–6. 218 Barry Buzan and Richard Little, “Why International Relations Has Failed as an Intellectual Project and What to Do About It,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30, no. 1 (2001), 19.

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have allowed political theorists to continue in their anachronism. In particular,

Skinner’s work is not just of methodological interest. His brand of contextualism

comes close to reconstituting historical inquiry as social theory and thus requires

detailed examination.

For Skinner, the central problem remains that we cannot interpret historical

authors as discussing issues of contemporary relevance but must attempt to

understand their work as a response to their own, historically specific, concerns.

Of central importance is what Skinner identified as the ‘mythologies’ often

present in the study of political thought.219 The first mythology of doctrines

consists of interpreting authors as if their writings were an attempt to expound a

complete doctrine on a subject, a doctrine that subsequent generations would

easily recognise. For Skinner the effects were twofold: an overestimation of the

significance of what might be “scattered or incidental remarks” and a risk of

attributing doctrines to authors without considering whether they would have or

could have expressed an opinion on the relevant subjects.220 Skinner’s position is

based on the presupposition that to understand an author’s position is to

understand it as a response to a particular debate. The mythology of doctrines is

based on the false assumption that such debates are perennial. Skinner’s project

thus turns on the historical specificity of the concerns of the authors under

examination.

The second mythology is that of prolepsis, which elides historical specificity.

Prolepsis in the Skinnerian sense is the description of past texts in terms of their

subsequent influence. In Skinnerian terminology this is the texts’ significance,

which Skinner contrasts with the meaning or author’s intention. The effect of such

an approach is that “no place is left for the analysis of what its author may have

intended or meant.”221 Thus, authorial intention is historically specific, and actual

intention depends on the particular possible intentions available to the author.

Apart from being philosophically untenable, the neglect of historical specificity

leads to two types of parochialism: the assumption that past authors were

responding to what we now regard as canonical authors; and “conceptualiz[ing]

219 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 32. 220 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 66. 221 Ibid., 72.

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an argument in such a way that its alien elements dissolve into a misleading

familiarity.”222

Skinner seems caught in a ‘catch-22’: his theory implies that any attempt to bring

a past text into the context of the present will dissolve its specificity, rendering its

meaning unrecoverable. Aware of these contradictions, Skinner states that “we

must learn to do our thinking for ourselves”223 and that the “philosophical, even

moral, value” of past texts lies in their distance from the present, the very way in

which they demonstrate the contingency of present ways of framing political

questions.224 The scholar’s concern thus becomes to uncover past political thought

in its unfamiliarity. That is, the scholar can retrieve a specific conception that can

be contrasted with other temporally specific conceptions. Thus, the process of

retrieval is not just of historical significance but also “of immediate philosophical

relevance.”225

By extending Austin’s speech-act theory to account for the difference between a

speech act and a text production, Skinner created a method that allows one to

recover past political thought without reducing it to familiarity. Skinner’s famous

dictum that political texts are attempts to “do things with words” focuses his

interest in Austin on the distinction between locution and illocution.226 Skinner’s

key insight is that locution and illocution are conceptually separable but

independent: “[t]here can be no doubt that the meaning of utterances helps to limit

the range of illocutionary forces they can bear.”227 Skinner sees authorial intention

and conventions as intimately connected. For Skinner, the central issue is “the

relationship between the linguistic dimension of illocutionary force and the

capacity of speakers to exploit that dimension.”228

Here Skinner usefully deviates from Austin. Derrida’s critique of Austin

elucidates the nature of the difference. Like Skinner, Derrida praises Austin’s

speech-act theory for seemingly avoiding construing language in terms of the

222 Ibid., 74, 76. 223 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 66. 224 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 88. 225 Ibid., II, 195. 226 Ibid., I, 103. 227 Ibid., I, 114. 228 Ibid., I, 105.

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communication of transparently accessible meaning.229 Derrida rejects the idea

that the meaning in which readers are interested is transparently accessible in the

text. He finds fault with Austin’s examination of failed performances. According

to Derrida, Austin is aware that the failure of a speech act is a permanent

possibility, that “all conventional acts are exposed to failure.”230 Derrida’s key

criticism is that Austin fails to acknowledge that this permanent possibility is in

fact necessary; something that prevents language’s proper operation is not

something outside of language but is inherent in the way language functions.231

This condition of both success and failure lies in what Derrida calls ‘iterability’.

As Austin emphasises, to carry illocutionary force a speech act must occur

according to certain conventions; it must repeat certain ritualistic forms (e.g., ‘I

promise,’ ‘I name this ship’). However, the iterability of utterances that allows

their conventional functioning is a general property that also allows them to be

repeated in circumstances in which they do not perform the associated

illocutionary act, notably when they are performed theatrically or ironically or just

in a different context. Austin excludes such language uses, but they depend on

precisely the same iterability as successful ‘serious’ use of language.232

Derrida emphasises that for Austin it is the speaker’s intention that ultimately

ensures an utterance’s ‘seriousness’. However, if this intention is to overcome the

aporias of conventionality, it must be separate from convention. Thus, Austin fails

to account for meaning that does not depend on some foundational, transparently

accessible meaning. If intentions are to exclude the failure that is a necessary

possibility of language use, they must be fully present in either the speaker or the

text.233

Thus, for Skinner’s theory of language to accomplish what he wants, he cannot

depend on this form of intentionality. For those interested in historical texts, the

author is never present, and to assume the presence of meaning in a text absent its

context condemns us to Skinner’s vision of parochialism. Leaving aside

229 Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kanuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 98. 230 Ibid., 100. 231 Ibid., 101. 232 Ibid., 103. 233 Ibid., 106.

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objections one might hold with respect to the philosophical basis of intentionality,

such an approach is unavailable to Skinner because he is interested in interpreting

texts when the author is not present and therefore the author’s mental state at the

time of writing is unrecoverable. Thus, Skinner emphasises intention in writing

(which exists to the extent that it is manifested by the produced text) rather than

the motive for writing (which may be separate from the text and inaccessible).234

Skinner’s alternative to causal explanation is explanation by redescription. Rather

than explaining an action by saying why it was done, redescription attempts to

convey an action’s meaning or, as Skinner puts it, “[w]hat an illocutionary

redescription will characteristically explain about a social action will be its

point.”235 Redescribing an utterance identifies what it is. On that basis, Skinner

positions redescriptive explanation before causal explanation: we need to know an

act’s type before we can explain why the act was performed. Redescription does

not point to anything separate from the utterance, whereas a causal explanation

must identify something separate that caused the utterance. If describing an

utterance is a form of redescriptive explanation, then the identified intention will

not be some property of an author separate from a text but a property manifested

by the text. The sort of meaning at issue here is social meaning, a property of a

text within its social context.236 The redescriptions with which we can acceptably

explain an utterance are limited by the meanings available to the utterance’s

author. These meanings are a matter of the language employed by the speaker and

their audience.

Skinner refers to a pervasive ideological context and discusses a cultural

lexicon.237 This lexicon consists of the words available to us, their

interrelationships, the circumstances in which we legitimately apply them, and the

evaluative forces they can be made to bear.238 By way of example, he considers

Marcel Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’ and whether they can be considered works of

art. Skinner suggests that the debate centres on the meaning of the term art,

whether ready-mades fall within the category of art (are objects not deliberately 234 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 138. 235 Ibid., I, 137. 236 Ibid., I, 135. 237 Skinner, “Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts,”; Skinner, “Hermeneutics and the Role of History,”. 238 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 163–9.

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created as art, still art?), the relation of art to other concepts (can an object be both

useful and a work of art?), and art’s value.239 In this sense a context is a complex

structure of words and possible practices.

Although Skinner has suggested that his methodology is fundamentally about

understanding authorial intentionality, this is necessarily linked to understanding

atemporally specific cultural lexicon. The lexicon can be conceptually

distinguished from particular discursive acts that employ it, but can be accessed

only through such discursive acts. Therefore, understanding authorial intentions in

the Skinnerian sense becomes a matter of extracting from the text conceptual

structures that evince the existence of the intentions.

In his response to Saul Kripke, Thomas Kuhn goes some way in addressing how

we might achieve this goal via his consideration of the concept of ‘paradigm’.240

Kripke argued that a term’s referent is determined by the term’s history, the causal

chain connecting users of the term to the object to which it refers.241 Kuhn adds

that the causal chain cannot be given for individual terms without reference to

other terms.242 Terms are introduced into a pre-existing vocabulary by reference to

terms already in that vocabulary. Kuhn gives examples of terms that are

introduced as part of a group of interrelated terms, such as acceleration, force, and

mass.243 Such groupings are relevant to terms common to political thought, such

as democracy, rights, or liberty, which do not generally deal with objects that can

be given an ostensive definition.

Kuhn’s point is that this holism produces quasi-analytic statements which must be

accepted as a precondition of using the terms involved with other members of the

linguistic community.244 Studying the history of these terms allows us to identify

these quasi-analytic statements and thus recover the structure of the vocabularies

they constitute, their causal relation with the world, and the internal relations

between concepts. Studying the arguments presented and accepted by past authors

239 Ibid., I, 163–4. 240 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 308–13. 241 Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity, rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). 242 Kuhn, The Road Since Structure, 43–4. 243 Ibid., 67. 244 Ibid., 304.

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with a view to the presuppositions that underlie these arguments allows us to

delineate the context within which they worked. This would enable the Skinnerian

project of recovering past theories and the structure that makes them unfamiliar

because such theories bear associations and presuppositions alien to our way of

thinking.

Thus, understanding past political thought depends on understanding what is

unfamiliar in the vocabulary of past political writing. The focus on a historically

specific context allows Skinner to isolate and retrieve political thought from a

particular period. The virtue is that it disrupts a teleological sense of political

thought. As expressed by Skinner, an awareness of the contingency of political

values:

can help liberate us from the grip of any one hegemonic account of those values and how they should be interpreted and understood. Equipped with a broader sense of possibility, we can stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of enquiry what we should think of them.245

In some sense, Skinner’s project continues E. H. Carr’s view of history as a social

process.246 In that view, historians immerse themselves in ‘“knowledge cultures’,

modes of thinking and reasoning practices which emerged in specific contexts and

which help to translate historical materials into social facts.”247

One of Skinner’s central concerns is investigating language’s role in shaping

political actions, in particular political principles (in this thesis, American

exceptionalism). Political realists and scholars with other perspectives have

argued that professed political principles play little role in shaping political action,

that expedient justification obscures real motives, so principles remain

epiphenomenal. For them the object of study must be material power and interests

(military or economic, depending on their persuasion). At the other extreme lies

the assumption that political agents act in accordance with sincere beliefs. The

direction of causality is thus clear, and the analyst is tasked with grasping the

245 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 6. 246 Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? Ed. Richard J. Evans, 40th Anniversary edn. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 247 Lawson, “The Eternal Divide?” 9.

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professed principles and matching them with the behaviour of the actor being

investigated. Neither extreme is satisfactory.

Skinner’s theory appeals largely because it reverses the direction of causation

between speech and action.248 Whatever a political agent’s motive for adopting a

particular action, the agent must justify it through reference to existing language

conventions. In turn, this will affect what the agent is able to articulate and act on.

Deviating too far from these lexical parameters would jeopardise political

legitimacy because it would involve the relinquishing of intelligibility. This is of

particular relevance in assessing what Skinner terms ‘untoward’ behaviour, which

violates the conventions of the time. According to Skinner, the task of the

‘innovative ideologist’ is to legitimate untoward social actions by manipulating

the meaning and application of concepts in order to modify political behaviour.249

By examining the intersubjective meanings of ‘evaluative-descriptive’ terms such

as freedom, patriotism, and security, which describe and normatively evaluate an

action, we can glimpse the establishment and reproduction of a society’s

normative parameters. However, these concepts are unstable and open to

challenge, manipulation, and transformation. As stated by Duncan Bell:

The essence of conceptual change thus lies in the malleable relationship between sense and reference through time and across space. How this change occurs is necessarily political since it involves conflict over meaning and action.250

Skinnerian contextualism and constructivism

The point of utilising Skinnerian contextualism is not to become mired in the

history-versus-theory debate or to artificially claim that emphasising the role of

language is alien to the field of international relations. Instead, this approach

allows a focus on the role of history and conceptual change and illuminates “how

political legitimacy is embedded in the set of political vocabularies available at a

given time.”251 As Lawson puts it, “moments in time take on relatively stable,

248 Duncan S. A. Bell, “Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27, no. 3 (2002), 5. 249 Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Thought and Action,”, 110. 250 Bell, “Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique,” 5. 251 Ibid., 327.

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meaningful shapes drawn from the interaction between particular events and the

repertoires of meaning brought to bear on the historical meaning.”252

This thesis builds upon the research agenda of constructivist international

relations253 and suggests that Skinnerian contextualism is a good methodological

fit with constructivist theories. Constructivism is “best understood as a meta-

theoretical commitment”254 and in International Relations that commitment is

“about human consciousness and its role in international life.”255 Specifically, a

constructivist approach asserts that:

(a) human interaction is shaped primarily by ideational factors, not simply material ones; (b) the most important ideational factors are widely shared or “intersubjective” beliefs, which are not reducible to individuals; and (c) these shared beliefs construct the interests and identities of purposive actors.256

Thus it makes the epistemological claim that meaning and hence knowledge is

socially constructed, because concepts are the conditions for the possibility of

knowledge. Furthermore, this knowledge is socially constructed. Concepts are

part of language and language cannot be reduced to something subjective or

objective:257

It is not subjective, since it exists independently of us to the extent that language is always more than its individual usages and prior to them. It is not objective, since it does not exist independently of our minds and our usage (language exists and changes through our use). It is intersubjective.258

These features make constructivism different from realism and liberalism;

equally, constructivist analyses use an ideational ontology, so it is not a theory of

252 Lawson, “The Eternal Divide?,” 15. 253 For the introduction of the term to International Relations see Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). 254 Stefano Guzzini, “The Concept of Power: A Constructivist Analysis,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 33, no. 3 (2005): 498. See also Friedrich Kratochwil, “Constructing a New Orthodoxy? Wendt’s ‘Social Theory of International Politics’ and the Constructivist Challenge,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 29, no. 1 (2000): 73–101. 255 John Gerard Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge,” International Organization, 52, no. 4 (1998): 856. 256 Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science, 4 (2001): 392–3. See also Adler, “Seizing the Middle Ground”; Alexander E. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 257 Guzzini, “The Concept of Power,” 498. 258 Ibid.

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politics but rather a social theory that makes claims about the nature of social life

and about social change. As a result it does not, on its own, produce specific

predictions about political outcomes that could be tested in social scientific

research.259

The constructivist umbrella covers a wide variety of commitments and

approaches. Alexander Wendt’s ‘systemic’ constructivism has focused on the

interaction between states in the international system.260 Martha Finnemore has

focused on the norms of international society and their effect on state identities

and interests.261 In the sub-genre defining book edited by Peter Katzenstein, a

variety of arguments suggest that culture, norms, and identity matter in

constructing national security.262

Ted Hopf suggests that there is actually a split within constructivism between

‘conventional’ and ‘critical’ versions.263 Whilst they share a rejection of

‘mainstream’ IR, critical constructivists owe much to post-modern and post-

structural approaches, primarily the assumption that actor and observer cannot be

separated.264 The key issues for conventional constructivists are norms and

identity; for critical constructivists, power and discourse. The suggestion is that

conventional constructivists operate between the ‘mainstream’ of International

Relations and critical theory.265 Conventional constructivists differ from

rationalists in their ontology because they emphasise a social ontology: “they

emphasize how ideational or normative structures constitute agents and their

interests.”266 In this configuration, conventional constructivism complements

259 Finnemore and Sikkink, “Taking Stock,” 393. 260 Alexander E. Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It – the Social Construction of Power-Politics,” International Organization, 46, no. 2 (1992): 391–425; Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics. 261 Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society, Cornell Studies in Political Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell University Press, 1996). 262 Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002); Peter J. Katzenstein et al., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein, New Directions in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 263 As Hopf notes in ibid., 181 (footnote 29), Jesperson et al., (“Norms, Identity, and Culture,” 46 [notes 41 and 42]) seek to differentiate themselves from the “radical constructivist” position of Richard Ashley, David Campbell, and R. B. J Walker. 264 Hopf, “The Promise of Constructivism,” 181–6. 265 Ibid., 171–200. 266 P. J. Katzenstein et al., “International Organization and the Study of World Politics,” International Organization, 52, no. 4 (1998): 675.

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rationalism with sociological perspectives but does not diverge substantially on

issues of epistemology or methodology. Thus, whilst the commitment of

conventional constructivists to social ontology differs significantly from the

mainstream of International Relations scholarship, they use positivist

epistemology.

In contrast, others have elaborated on critical epistemological positions available

to constructivists, stating that “the new generation of critical theorists (in the

1990s) has been labelled ‘constructivists’ because of their characteristic concern

with the social construction of world politics.”267 As Price and Reus-Smit suggest,

the most important difference between conventional (or ‘modernist’ in their

terminology) and critical (‘postmodernist’ in their terms) constructivism is

analytical, “the former concentrating on the sociolinguistic construction of

subjects and objects in world politics and the latter focusing on the relationship

between power and knowledge.”268

What emerges is that, although constructivism has become mainstream in

International Relations over the past decade, an ordered and consistent

methodological framework or object of study is rare.269 As a result, the treatment

of American grand strategy by constructivist scholars has been strongly

contested.270 So, whilst they may have agreed on the importance of collective

understandings of foreign policy, Jackson and Nexon made an important critical

refutation of Legro’s conventional constructivist account of ideational change in

American grand strategy. They suggested that he implicitly relied on

“functionalist reasoning”271 and, furthermore, they contended that he could not

adequately explain the ideational shift from unilateralism to internationalism in

U.S. grand strategy: “[I]t is not simply the ‘availability’ of a better heterodoxy

that explains American internationalism, but the concrete ways in which the

267 Price and Reus-Smit, “Dangerous Liaisons?” 266. 268 Ibid., 268. 269 Amir Lupovici, “Constructivist Methods: A Plea and Manifesto for Pluralism,” Review of International Studies, 35, no. 1 (2009): 195. 270 See the exchange between Jeffrey W. Legro (“Whence American Internationalism,” International Organization, 54, no. 2 (2000): 253–89 and “Whither My Argument? A Reply to Jackson and Nexon,” Dialogue IO, 1, no. 1 (2002): 103–7) and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel Nexon, “Whence Causal Mechanisms? A Comment on Legro,” Dialogue IO, 1, no. 1 (2002): 81–102. 271 Jackson and Nexon, “Whence Causal Mechanisms?” 2.

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diffusion of specific ideas altered extant political and ideological networks to

make them ripe for transformation.”272

This thesis is sympathetic to Jackson273 and Nexon’s point. Legro repeated his

own problematic failure to adequately explain ideational change274 and the

question of where new ideas came from is one he admits that his theoretical

position cannot explain.275 This thesis deploys Skinnerian contextualism because

whilst it rectifies Legro’s position by providing an account of ideological change

it does so without Jackson’s attempt to imbue concepts themselves with agency,

“as alternate logics of identity are simply swept away.”276

In important respects this thesis also departs from structural versions of

constructivist research in international relations and the traditional history of

political thought. First, unlike many constructivist studies,277 it seeks to engage

with interests and ideas at a domestic, rather than international, level. This is an

attempt to “bring society back into social constructivism . . . the society within

states rather than the society between them.”278 As Deniz Kandiyoti observes:

“[t]he question of what and who constitutes the West, or any Other, often has less

to do with the outside world than with the class, religious or ethnic cleavages

within the nation itself.”279

Second, this thesis will treat exceptionalism as a form of ideology. The texts dealt

with are not on the whole explicit political theory, although some are. Historians

272 Ibid., 18. 273 See also Jackson, “Defending the West”; Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “Whose Identity?: Rhetorical Commonplaces in ‘American’ Wartime Foreign Policy,” in Identity and Global Politics: Empirical and Theoretical Elaborations, ed. Patricia M. Goff and Kevin C. Dunn (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2006); Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, “The Present as History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 274 Jeffrey W. Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Ithaca, N.Y.; Bristol: Cornell University Press; University Presses Marketing, 2005). 275 Ibid., 182. 276 Jackson, “Whose Identity?” 175, 186. 277 Friedrich V. Kratochwil, Rules, Norms, and Decisions on the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs, vol. 2 of Cambridge Studies in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Onuf, World of Our Making; Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics; Hopf, “The Promise of Constructivism.” 278 Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics, xiv. 279 Deniz Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 20, no. 3 (1991): 439.

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of political thought have usually treated the history of the state’s ideas as the

history of the polis, ‘the self-contained, firmly bounded, sovereign and integrated

community.’280 However, a series of authors have applied Cambridge School

contextualism to international political theory, various strands of ideology, and

more contemporary periods, thereby expanding the temporal scope and focus of

such study.281 On the whole, the texts examined in this thesis do not deal with

self-conscious political theory – at least, not in the traditional sense. However,

grand strategy is necessarily an expression of a worldview and, in the case of the

objects of this thesis, how the United States engages with the world and to what

end.

Although it is difficult to neatly place Quentin Skinner within the taxonomy of

International Relations theory, this thesis argues that his approach is consistent

with constructivist thought. As Chris Brown has suggested, “many and various are

the positions which hold that there is something fundamentally suspect about the

thought of modernity.”282 Skinner perhaps sits in an isolated corner of the range of

post-positivist thought. It is unlikely that he would consider himself a post-

modernist or post-structuralist, but, nonetheless, he does raise the type of doubts

about the “‘Iron cage’ of reason”283 which are characteristic of post-positivist

approaches. Crucially, Skinner makes considerably stronger epistemological

claims than many post-structuralists.284 So, as the last section concluded, whilst

Skinner might agree with Derrida that contexts in their entirety cannot be

retrieved, for him there is a relevant context outside the text which can be

plausibly described.285

280 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, vol. 59 of Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4. 281 Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Janet Coleman, “The Practical Use of Begriffsgeschichte,” Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, 3 (1999), 28–40; Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Dale B. Vieregge, “The Devolution of American Social Welfare Policy, 1935–1996: Perceptions, Ideologies, and Moral Desert” (2003), in http://sitemaker.umich.edu/vieregge/files/the_devolution_of_american_social_welfare_policy.pdf. 282 Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches, 196. 283 Ibid.,197. 284 Saul Cornell, “Splitting the Difference: Textualism, Contextualism and Post-Modern History,” American Studies, 36, no. 1 (1995): 57–80; Ryan Walter, “Reconciling Foucault and Skinner on the State: The Primacy of Politics?” History of the Human Sciences, 21, no. 3 (2008): 94–114. 285 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 121–2.

63

Although Skinner himself claimed that his notion of context seemed to leave “the

traditional figure of the author in extremely poor health . . . mere precipitates of

their context,”286 such a conclusion is excessive. Context of the Skinnerian kind is

precisely what provides the possibility for authors to act. Skinner is making the

claim that authors are acting when delivering their utterances into an existing

context and thus that the illocutionary force of an utterance will reveal “what the

author was doing in issuing it.”287 For both Skinner and constructivists, “the fact

that history is ‘interpretation dependent’ does not mean it is unknowable, only that

the test of historical knowledge must be plausibility not infallibility.”288

This thesis suggests that such knowledge claims are consistent with constructivist

thought. Perhaps the only way to study what Anthony Gidden termed

“structuration”289 is diachronically. As expressed by Christian Reus-Smit, “[y]ou

have to cut into a social order at a particular time, identify the agents and social

structures, and then trace how they condition one another over time.”290 Although

Skinner’s own corpus of work seems to deny the utility of studying concepts over

long periods, Melvin Richter has suggested using the Cambridge School

contextualism to examine the different meanings and usages of political concepts

over time,291 his aim being to trace breaks in the use of particular concepts in

order to determine how particular canons or tropes are reproduced and reworked

over time.292

Reus-Smit makes the point that the constructivist philosophy of history is

essentially Skinnerian, even if it departs from Skinner’s approach with regard to

comparative case studies and macro-history. Crucially for both Skinner and

constructivists, history is “a knowable realm of human experience, about the role

of ideas in constituting that experience and about the appropriate methods for

286 Ibid., I, 118. 287 Ibid., I, 98. 288 Christian Reus-Smit, “Reading History Through Constructivist Eyes,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 37, no. 2 (2008), 405. 289 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Introduction of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984). 290 Reus-Smit, “Reading History Through Constructivist Eyes,” 397. 291 Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 292 Ibid.

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interpreting the constitutive role of ideas.”293 Contra Ranke, such an approach is

apparent as far back as Carr’s assertion that the “belief in [a] hard core of

historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the

historian is a preposterous fallacy.”294 According to Carr, a fact “is like a sack – it

won’t stand up until you’ve put something in it.”295

With social history, “the presence of ambiguity and the virtuosity of the

interpretative act are at a premium.”296 Reus-Smit indicates that the constructivist

position with regard to history’s ‘knowability’ is both ontological and

epistemological: history comprises an infinite array of facts that can be put

together in a variety of ways and that depend on interpretation.297 Skinner applies

similar logic in asserting that if, like Derrida, an interpretation has to be certain

rather than merely plausible,298 then the intention with which a text was written

and what the author meant can never be retrieved.299 Skinner’s point is that such a

position “is insisting on too stringent an account of what it means to have reasons

for our beliefs.”300

Skinner emphasises hermeneutic interpretation over causal explanation. His

preoccupation with the relationship between text and context does not imply a

causal or determinative role for context. The social context is relevant only insofar

as it conditions the interpreter’s understanding of what constitutes the range of

conventionally recognisable meanings within a particular society.

Skinner’s approach is relevant to this thesis largely because this study

presupposes the necessity of discussing the social and political context within

which change takes place when studying change in a political concept such as

American exceptionalism. For Skinner, such study should include the agent’s

intention, the meaning of statements, their force, and their effects on listeners and

readers.

293 Reus-Smit, “Reading History Through Constructivist Eyes,” 400. 294 Carr, What Is History? 2. 295 Ibid., 11. 296 S. H. Haber et al., “Brothers under the Skin – Diplomatic History and International Relations,” International Security, 22, no. 1 (1997): 39–40. 297 Reus-Smit, 403–4. 298 Skinner, “Meaning and Context,” 64. 299 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 122. 300 Ibid.

65

This thesis recognises that it does not fully meet Skinner’s methodological

demands; it is arguable how many Skinnerian inspired studies actually do, and

Quentin Skinner’s own research, whilst extensive, is not exhaustive.301 The

intentions of authors, the force of their statements, and their statements’ effects on

others are requirements far too strict for a comparative study of four different time

periods covering over half a century. Within its limited strictures no thesis could

provide a comprehensive study of contextual factors. However, this thesis also

contends that a less than comprehensive contextual survey is still intellectually

illuminating and contextualism need not be exhaustive. Unlike the work of

Skinner himself, this thesis also attempts to recreate the context at four

historically separate junctures.

It is important to note that the use of Skinnerian contextualism leads to a

fundamentally different understanding of American exceptionalism to the existing

scholarship.302 This difference manifests empirically but also theoretically, in the

explication of how exceptionalism is inculcated into American grand strategy.

Although conventional treatments of exceptionalism have differed in their

conclusions, they have repeated the same methodological mistake. This mistake is

evident in Hunt’s suggestion that:

Because of a remarkable cultural stability, Americans have felt no urgent need to take their foreign-policy ideology out for major overhaul or replacement but have instead enjoyed the luxury of being able able by and large to take it for granted…Americans could afford to leave their ideology implicit and informal.303

This thesis fundamentally challenges the suggestion that American

exceptionalism has meant the same thing in different epochs.304 Instead the

301 This thesis was inspired by Duncan S. A. Bell’s The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). Whilst owing his methodology to Skinner, Bell necessarily sketches the context rather than exhaustively surveying the primary documents, a task beyond a single volume and, as Skinner’s own corpus suggests, perhaps even a single lifetime. 302 The most influential examples of conventional treatments of American exceptionalism have been, Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy; Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword; McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State. See footnote 7 for a more extensive guide to the scholarship of American exceptionalism. 303 Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 13. 304 Even attempts to grapple with changes in meaning of American exceptionalism limit the frequency and scope of ideological change and do not seek to explain the changes, rather to explore the effects of the change. See, McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State for a study

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research seeks to recreate the different meanings of exceptionalism at different

points in time. So whilst the thesis agrees with existing scholarship that American

exceptionalism is fundamentally a debate concerned with the perception of the

Republic as a different type of state, it does not seek to impose a temporally

consistent understanding of this debate for the sake of analytic parsimony. Instead

it brings to life a bitterly contested debate over America’s fundamental nature and

purpose, even over the half century under study here. The research employs a

deliberately ecumenical understanding of exceptionalism, which strays beyond

overt invocation of American purpose. As the texts reveal, many actors have not

been conspicuous in their appeals to exceptionalism, indeed the belief in

American exceptionalism has often been implicit within specific debates about

foreign policy issues and interventions.

Americans are not unique in regarding their nation as exemplary. Many nations

lay some claim to superiority.305 In the twentieth century only the Soviet Union

rivalled the United States in its claim to prophetic messianism and historical

transcendence. Originating in the Puritan vision of the New World “city on a

hill,”306 the idea of American exceptionalism was contested in tandem with

notions of continental expansion and, in the twentieth century, global power. The

pervasiveness of the idea makes American exceptionalism the para-ideological

umbrella for such related concepts as manifest destiny, the American dream, and a

new world order. Other recurring ideas of the same root include the protection and

extension of the ideal and practice of democracy and the moral responsibility such

a project entailed. American exceptionalism is para-ideological because it is a set

of related language that explains the world and the role of the United States

therein but it lacks the coherence of a formal ideology and has not been codified

as a means toward a single, definable political end.307

which splits American foreign policy as having been influenced by either the “old testament” (exemplative) or “new testament” (proselytziing and crusading) understandings of exceptionalism. 305 Holsti, “Exceptionalism in American Foreign Policy.” 306 John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” (1630) reprinted in David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook. Vol. 1, 1630–1865 (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15; For analysis of the early roots of American exceptionalism see Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). 307 McEvoy-Levy, American Exceptionalism and U.S. Foreign Policy, 22–5.

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This study explores how American political elites viewed their country’s place in

the world and the meaning of this para-ideology at key points in American

strategic policy. The aim is not to provide a new theory of American

exceptionalism or expose beliefs in American exceptionalism as true or false.

Instead, it is to show how various conceptions of American exceptionalism arose

amid the competitive context of political argument and, in turn, manifested in a

conceptual ordering of the world that became ingrained in grand strategy at four

critical junctures in American history.

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Chapter 3. Exceptionalism, The Republic, and The Evolution of

American Foreign Policy and International Thought, 1738–1945

This chapter examines how political leaders of the United States have understood

the world of international relations. It explores thought about the place of the

United States in the world through the lens of American political experience from

the founding of the republic until the cessation of hostilities in 1945,308 and

examines how American domestic and foreign policy developed in tandem over

time. It goes on to suggest that the foundation of the republic was a process that

was inherently informed by international politics and, equally, as American

foreign policy developed it was informed by these founding principles.

The first statements of National Security Council Report 68 (hereafter NSC-68),309

the codifying document of America’s Cold War experience, indicate the

importance of such an exploration. Underscoring the primacy of America’s

founding principles, NSC-68 includes a section near the start titled “The

Fundamental Purpose of the United States.”310 According to NSC-68, the

Constitution’s preamble states this purpose: “to form a more perfect Union,

establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense,

promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and

our Posterity.” This aspect of NSC-68 makes explicit an often-overlooked fact

about an element of continuity in American political thought and in thought about

the international system: America’s purpose was defined in terms of perfection of

the Union.

308 Although it does indicate some notable points of ideological innovation, this chapter is not intended as a substantive contextual study: it is not possible to achieve this in a compressed form for such a long period of time. Instead it is a review of the ideas, debate, and points of continuity and discontinuity over an extended period in order to frame the following chapters. The historical detail comes from a variety of sources cited in the text but the narrative comes principally from Oscar Handlin and Lilian Handlin, Liberty in America, 1600 to the Present (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); David C. Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789–1941, American Political Thought (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2009); George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776, The Oxford History of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Quinn, US Foreign Policy in Context; Wood, The Idea of America. 309 White House, “A Report to the National Security Council – NSC-68” (12 April 1950), [hereafter NSC-68] http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/sectioned.php?documentid=10–1&pagenumber=1&groupid=1 [accessed 03/08/11]. 310 Ibid., 9.

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This chapter starts at the point when the former British colonists had to codify

their states’ relationships with one another and with the rest of the world.

Questions regarding states’ relationships would ultimately be resolved with the

creation of the Union, a project that was justified in part by arguments pointing to

international relations. The nascent United States faced a series of immediate

challenges in its relationship with the international system – most notably, how to

manage relations with its former colonial master, how to react to revolutionary

fervour in France, and how to pursue American neutrality amid a global war

centred on Franco-British enmity.

From the outset, the Founding Fathers were concerned with a number of central

questions which were initially focused on the nature of relations between the

constituent states. The primary issues were concerned with the nature of interstate

relations, the conditions under which war occurred, and the concept of

interference in the affairs of other states.311

Although most of these questions explicitly related to the young country’s

domestic character, the answers they generated also informed the American view

of the international system. The questions would be continually debated and

challenged. Although not always consciously orientated toward America’s

international relations, many of the domestic questions would spill into American

foreign policy.312

In the respect that it was absorbed with these issues, the United States was

unusual as, from the outset, it was absorbed at the domestic level with answering

these questions as part of the process of establishing federal union. However, this

thesis is not making an argument suggesting that America was or was not

exceptional. It is concerned, rather, with how political actors in America

interpreted, contested, and ultimately redefined for successive generations what

their shared belief in American exceptionalism meant.

The debates over the Constitution in 1787 and 1788 raised a number of questions

which were as pertinent to relations between nations as they were to those 311 Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire, ix–x; see also Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 49–55, for the interrelation of domestic and international concerns. 312 See Chapter 4 for an example of the recurrence of the “slavery/freedom” binary applied to the international system.

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between the American states. However, the travails of the Union and its states

have received little recognition in either diplomatic history or the literature on

international relations. Scholars often overlook that the authors of the Constitution

of the United States were motivated to perfect the Union largely by the

inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation in matters of defence and foreign

policy.313

Equally, the United States was in part conceived as a product of international

relations. The nation did not exist as a legal entity until the European powers

recognised its independence in the treaties that comprised the Peace of Paris.

Therefore, 3 September 1783 rather than 4 July 1776 is this chapter’s starting

point. U.S. activity on the world stage evinced that the United States had achieved

nationhood. John Jay wrote in The Federalist:

As a nation we have made peace and war. As a nation we have vanquished our common enemies; as a nation we have formed alliances, and made treaties, and entered into various compacts and conventions with foreign states.314

The first twenty-nine of the eighty-five Federalist papers comprise an extended

argument for ratifying the Constitution on foreignpolicy grounds.315 Between

1776 and 1787 there was concern that the states would be incapable of forming or

maintaining a union and that they could expect the wars and other conflicts that

were the common experience of neighbouring peoples. The fear was that a state

system might develop in North America. The dynamic of U.S. politics from 1789

to 1861 involved the occurrence, approximately every ten years, of a monumental

sectional crisis averted only through an unexpected turn of events or inspired

statesmanship. Because disunion was understood as a virtual synonym for war,

the threat of force remained a constant. In other words:

‘Union’ was not the belated outcome of the Revolution, but rather its central and defining problem from the very outset. American

313 For an examination of this scholarly lacuna see Emily S. Rosenberg, “A Call to Revolution: A Roundtable on Early U.S. Foreign Relations: Introduction,” Diplomatic History, 22, no. 1 (1998): 63–70; Peter S. Onuf, “A Declaration of Independence for Diplomatic Historians,” Diplomatic History, 22, no. 1 (1998): 71–83. 314 John Jay, “Federalist No. 2 Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 92. 315 James Madison et al., The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987).

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constitutionalism was shaped by the Revolutionaries’ experience in successive world systems.316

Thus, this chapter eschews the oft-repeated claim that the “Anguishing dilemmas

of security that tormented European Nations did not touch America for nearly 150

years.”317 From the American Revolution to the Civil War and beyond, the same

security problems that preoccupied European statesmen were a concern for

Americans. American domestic politics was filled with internationalist language.

American doctrines emerged on the balance of power,318 the equality of states,

and defence against aggression.319 The problem of anarchy within the states was

central to the architecture of the early Union.320 The Civil War’s continental scale

illustrates that this was a well-founded concern and that conflicts within the Union

were equal to those of continental Europe.

Against the backdrop of Gordon Wood’s influential view that constitutional

innovation was only tangentially concerned with problems of interstate relations

and the international context,321 this chapter argues that, whilst the domestic

model of a perfectible Union is crucial to understanding the intellectual lineage of

U.S. foreign policy, the “Philadelphian System” which emerged was equally

concerned with the other three threats to security.322 The point is that, by placing

the formation of the Union within an international context, it is possible to

understand American federalism as a contribution to international constitutional

thought:323 “Federalism was not just a domestic order but a potential world system

. . . set free from the mercantilism and monarchy of empires past.”324

A Union of states emerged; then, after considerable debate, a bipartisan policy of

detachment from European rivalries and, ultimately, a spheres-of-influence 316 Onuf, “A Declaration of Independence for Diplomatic Historians,” 72; emphasis added. 317 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 20. 318 John Lamberton Harper, American Machiavelli: Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 173. 319 Ibid., 211. 320 Peter S. Onuf, “Anarchy and the Crisis of the Union,” in To Form a More Perfect Union: The Critical Ideas of the Constitution, ed. Herman Belz et al. (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1992). 321 Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 322 Deudney, Bounding Power, 161–89. 323 For the a detailed study of the international context of the Declaration of Independence see, David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). 324 Rosenberg, “A Call to Revolution,” 64.

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demarcation of global authority which would eventually take the form of the

Monroe Doctrine. At the core of the intellectual debate was “the Unionist

Paradigm,”325 which was primarily concerned with the predicaments of free states

in union, a state of affairs that should be familiar to scholars of international

relations. Central to the unionist paradigm was the belief that Americans had to

create and perpetuate a form of political association by which republican

governments that were committed to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”326

could join together in a workable federal system in order to escape the anarchy of

states on the one hand and the despotism of centralised empire on the other.

Americans nevertheless sought to safeguard two positive values with which

anarchy and despotism were closely identified: respectively, the liberty of states

and the preservation of peace across a territory of imperial dimensions.

Within this context the founders can be seen as having sought institutions that

would enable the Union to prevail over the forces that threatened it while limiting

the Union’s power. Achieving this balance was America’s central problem.

When the old Union died in 1861, a more entrenched sense of U.S. nationalism

emerged. Before then “the two words ‘United States’ were generally used as a

plural noun: ‘the United States’ are a republic.’ After 1865 the United States

became a singular noun. The loose union of states became a nation.”327

The Constitution, the Union, and the balance of power

The founders of the United States regarded the wars that had afflicted North

America before independence as a consequence of British rule. Ties to the

imperial centre, they argued, had dragged them into European power rivalries.

Independence from Britain partly represented the potential for freedom from these

rivalries,328 but achieving this freedom would require keeping disparate states

325 David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2003). 326 Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence: Thomas Jefferson’s Manuscript 1776” (College Park, MD.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1776), http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration.html. [accessed 10/08/11]. 327 James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), viii. 328 Quinn, U.S. Foreign Policy in Context, 36.

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together.329 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and fellow federalists warned

that rejecting the proposed Union in favour of separate confederacies would result

in conflict and replicate or create a more unstable situation than that in Europe.

Hamilton observed, “to look for a continuation of harmony between a number of

independent unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighbourhood[,]

would be to disregard the uniform course of human events.”330

Throughout The Federalist the arguments reveal concerns with intra-state

anarchy. However, Hamilton and Madison, The Federalist’s primary authors,

were also sceptical about the possibility of peaceful cooperation between nations

in the absence of higher authority. They knew that the remedy for this required the

possibility of more concentrated power, creating a terrible trade-off for free

government. Hamilton noted:

Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. To be more safe they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.331

It was the observation of the European experience that informed the views of the

founding fathers. Hamilton argued that relying on reason to guarantee peace was

dangerous.332 He stated that there was “nothing absurd or impracticable in the idea

of a league or alliance between independent nations,” despite the complexity of

the European alliance system that had been formed with “a view to establishing

the equilibrium of power and peace of that part of the world.”333 Hamilton wrote:

they were scarcely formed before they were broken, giving an instructive lesson to mankind about how little dependence is to be placed on treaties which have no other sanction than the obligations of good faith and which oppose general considerations of peace and justice to the impulse of any immediate interest and passion.334

329 Thomas Jefferson and Paul Leicester Ford, The Works of Thomas Jefferson (New York; London: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1904), 7, 410. 330 Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist No. 6 Concerning Dangers from War between the States,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 104. 331 Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist No. 8 The Effects of Internal War in Producing Standing Armies and Other Institutions Unfriendly to Liberty,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 114. 332 Hamilton, “Federalist No. 6,” 104. 333 Ibid. 334 Ibid.

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In an important sense “the Philadelphian System” was a conscious ‘other’ to the

European state system, an acknowledgement of but, nonetheless, a rejection of

European models of balance of power. The founding fathers were animated by the

complex logic of republican thought on security, which can best be encapsulated

by the paradox that “individual security requires the bounding (i.e. control) of

power but power itself is bounding (i.e. involves ever more extensive

capabilities).”335 This central insight into the core argument linking the domestic

creation of the Union and the thought of the founding fathers on international

relations has not been fully appreciated by either realist or liberal analysis.

This system had important differences with the idealised conception of the

Westphalian system.336 First, there was a different distribution of sovereignty. The

Westphalian hierarchical state limited union to fleeting alliances, as Hamilton

noted in the preceding quote. Second, both orders had different forms of

separation of power. In Europe it was material and geographic, while in the

Philadelphian system it was a formalised constitutional arrangement between the

three arms of government, which shared power rather than creating autonomous

institutions, requiring concurrent approval between them. In other words, the

strength of the union reinforced the division of power in America. Third, the

balance of power in Europe and America had different roles. In Europe, within

states, balance of power was quashed by absolute monarchy and between states

anarchy reigned. In America the ‘balancer’, the armed people, remained dormant.

Finally, the American political identity remained both capitalist and republican,

contrasting with the entrenched hybrid of feudalism and capitalism in Europe and

an aristocratic warlike tradition which asserted itself in international politics.337

For Hamilton, the other key ‘European factor’ in the shaping of the republic was

her strategic position. Hamilton argued that disunion would ruin American

interests, whereas secure union would offer the United States unique

335 Chris Brown, “Review of Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village by Daniel H. Deudney,” Political Theory, 36, no. 4 (2008): 648. 336 The term “Philadelphian System” and its difference from the Westphalian System are characterized by Deudney, Bounding Power, 179. 337 Ibid., 180–81.

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opportunities, especially given the country’s geographical advantages.338 He

wrote:

If we are wise enough to preserve the Union, . . . we may for ages enjoy an advantage similar to that of an insulated situation. Europe is at great distance from us. Her colonies in our vicinity are too much disproportioned in strength, to be able to give us dangerous annoyance. Extensive military establishments cannot, in this position, be necessary to our security.339

The Jeffersonian vision for the future of the nation was based on the idea of

fashioning a union of perfect republics. The nature of the world within which the

American republics existed made such a union a necessity. Whilst trade and

relations with the rest of the world were necessary, they also threatened to corrupt

the republics. Both the balance of power between them and the future of their

conjoined shape and, in turn, how they would conduct themselves on the

international stage depended on the structure of the union. Jefferson and his

contemporaries did not appear to make the same distinction between domestic and

international that contemporary scholars use.

Whilst the union between the American republic states eliminated anarchy

between them, it was not able to eliminate the threat from foreign powers,

particularly those who were not inclined to recognise the Union. There was a

persistent fear of the attempted reassertion of European imperial dominion,340 not

to mention bitter division between the political elites on how America should

position herself with regard to her former colonial master, how to respond to the

French Revolution, and what position to take in ongoing Franco-British conflict.

It is important to note that this conscious formation of American identity in

opposition to Europe’s balance-of-power system is key to the discourse of

American exceptionalism.341 As early as the 1660s, Puritan ideas of divine

providence and exceptionalism had started to dissipate. The exceptionalist

impulse had taken a different tack with the Declaration of Independence, centred

338 See Quinn, U.S. Foreign Policy in Context, 39–40. 339 Hamilton, “Federalist No. 8,” 117. 340 Frederick W. Marks, Independence on Trial: Foreign Affairs and the Making of the Constitution (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1986). 341 Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire, 69.

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on denouncing tyrannical rule and asserting the natural right of free individuals to

form a civil society.342

Rather than sharply dividing political relations into foreign and domestic realms,

American republicans saw nested sets of relationships. Diplomatic relations with

foreign powers were at the outer extremity, while relations between the American

states took up their own sphere, differing in shape and degree but not in kind from

other political relations. The challenge was to determine the degree to which the

law of nations offered an appropriate framework for organising a union of

republics.343 Vattel had described relations between European states,344 and he did

recognise the advantages of federal alliances; however, he did not provide a clear

articulation of how the sovereign diplomatic powers of that federation could be

exercised.

The law of nations was not the only conceptual model available. Before 1776, the

American states had simply been provinces within the British Empire. This had

been seen as an extended polity organised under an informal constitution or

customary framework. Therefore, under the dominion of a distant metropolis they

were able to exercise a degree of sovereignty.345 For Jefferson, a stronger union

between the states became a strategy for overcoming their weakness within the

Atlantic states system. In the period directly preceding the Philadelphia

Convention, Madison concluded that only a strong federal union could preserve

republicanism in the separate states and pre-empt interstate conflict. Without such

a powerful force, the American states system would mirror the European states

system.346

The domestic concern of governing a vast country is at the heart of The

Federalist. Territorial size was directly linked to the problems of republic and

empire. Was vast territory compatible with a virtuous republic? Ancient Rome

served as the central reference point. Since the Renaissance, Rome had been the

342 Gutfeld, American Exceptionalism. 343 Peter S. Onuf and Leonard J. Sadosky, Jeffersonian America, Problems in American History (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 176. 344 Emer de Vattel et al., The Law of Nations, or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns, with Three Early Essays on the Origin and Nature of Natural Law and on Luxury (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2008). 345 Onuf and Sadosky, Jeffersonian America, 179. 346 Ibid., 186–7; Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire, 70–77.

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favourite source of ‘lessons’ regarding the fate of states. On the strength of the

Roman example, Montesquieu demonstrated in the mid-eighteenth century that

republics could extend themselves by conquest, but in so doing they should not

expect to reproduce their constitutional system, their true essence.347 The warning

seemed to be that expansion would lead to a destruction of virtue. The implication

that the U.S. republic might internally degenerate into an imperial tyranny,

complete with militarism and depravity, was not pleasant for Americans to

ponder.348

Madison attempted to solve the problem by inventing a wholly indigenous

American model based on the rejection of Europe and the creation of a republic of

popular sovereignty. In such a republic vastness was not a problem but a boon,

insurance against corruption and decline. If politically embodied at the centre in a

series of institutional checks and balances, vastness would prevent any one

interest group, faction, or region from dominating and thereby destroying the

whole.349 Madison’s federal solution laid the foundation for future expansion.

After the 1820s, Jacksonians would take the logic one step further and espouse the

view that popular republics needed to expand to stay healthy.350

Like their European contemporaries, the founders highlighted the idea of

translatio imperii: the notion that, at any given time, a single dominant power or

people advances civilisation and that historical succession is a matter of westward

movement.351 Americans found this notion attractive because it sanctioned

America’s becoming the next great embodiment of civilisation. The global circle

had been completed; there was no territory farther west to be discovered, just a

huge and empty territory to be transformed.

347 Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion, and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 186. 348 Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood, Jeffersonian America (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 54. 349 Richard K. Matthews, If Men Were Angels: James Madison and the Heartless Empire of Reason (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 127; Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 48. 350 See Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York; London: Norton, 2005); and, for a view which suggests that Jacksonianism translated into a particular type of foreign policy see Mead, Special Providence. 351 Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from the Tempest to Tarzan (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 111.

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At the political level, this huge federation of states with the potential for both

growth and disintegration had to confront the question of identity, what the

‘national self’ might mean, and how it would be projected. Thomas Jefferson’s

vision of the exceptional Union would be emblematic of the nineteenth century.

The European state that he abhorred was essentially an apparatus for war and the

calculation of attendant dangers and benefits.352 Europeans considered it rational

and legitimate to wage war for any reason short of obliterating the enemy state.

The system was brutish but based on the idea that enemies were essentially equal.

There was no room for any universal ideology of moral right. In contrast,

Jeffersonians invested the American project with a quality of universal right. They

saw the United States as embodying the interests of all humans, whose material

conditions varied so widely. Their own nation hardly warranted the term nation

because it exhibited none of the entrenched military establishment and consequent

tax apparatus of most European nations. The external precondition for this was the

continent’s relative security. For Jefferson, Americans were historically the first

to be truly free, able to create a completely new society. Because the United States

was the first place where humans could be free, western expansion was by

definition a step toward universal liberation. Such expansion advanced what

Jefferson called the ‘empire for liberty’.353 Defining expansion in this way

suggested that any potential enemy obstructed the course of natural freedom.

Jefferson’s first address as president represented a remarkable act of ideological

innovation. Making use of Washington’s farewell address and reversing his own

previous political position, he successfully created consensus regarding America’s

separateness from Europe, and thus justification for a policy of non-alignment.

Jefferson’s presidency was “key to embedding the principle of ‘detachment’ from

Europe in U.S. foreign policy thought.”354 Whilst commercial links with Europe

were unavoidable, they were to be pursued with minimal political

entanglement.355

352 Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 54–6. 353 Ibid., 65–71. 354 Quinn, U.S. Foreign Policy in Context, 54. 355 Lawrence S. Kaplan, Entangling Alliances with None: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987), 22.

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Dividing the world and the Monroe Doctrine

Although Jefferson’s shrewd crafting of consensus on foreign policy did not end

turmoil in foreign affairs, the Philadelphian system of strong domestic union and

neutrality towards Europe (minimising foreign influence on the United States)

nevertheless remained central to U.S. grand strategy.

By the second decade of the nineteenth century that system was threatened by the

possibility of ‘Old World’ involvement to suppress Latin American revolution.

Equally, as secretary of state, John Quincy Adams’s twin aims had been to

exclude British claims in North America whilst extending as far as possible

American claims. This mix of Adams’s ideas would find expression in Monroe’s

message of 1823, later known as the Monroe Doctrine:

That the American continents by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power.356

Adams had already established a moratorium on further colonisation; now he was

extending this to any conquest of the New World or intervention in its political

affairs. In effect he was moving from non-colonisation to non-intervention.357

Furthermore, this was raised to the status of vital interest.358

It was in Adams’s conception of “two separate systems, two spheres” that

American exceptionalism became apparent.359 The Doctrine formulated strategy

so as to:

‘remove’ the United States from the broader international system and the European balance of power. The US portrayed itself as different from the European nations, who fought for their interests in an inescapable and competitive system of rival states.360

356 James Monroe, “Seventh Annual Message to Congress” (2 December 1823), http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llac&fileName=041/llac041.db&recNum=4 [accessed 03/08/11], 14. 357 Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1949), 387. 358 Quinn, U.S. Foreign Policy in Context, 56. 359 Bemis, John Quincy Adams, 364. 360 Quinn, U.S. Foreign Policy in Context, 57.

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The Doctrine extended this formulation to imply that, in the Americas, a new

system of states was coming into existence and that this system’s members had

interests that were separate from, but not in conflict with, those of European

nations.361 As Adams expressed it,

the political system of the United States is also extra-European . . . [F]or the repose of Europe, as well as of America, the European and American political systems should be kept as separate and distinct from each other as possible.362

It is not clear from Monroe’s address what the logical justification was for closing

the Americas to European colonisation. The phrase which seems to answer that

question is “by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and

maintain.”363

Whilst it seemed fairly straightforward that the U.S. should assert their “free and

independent condition,” it is less clear how that assertion could be transferred to

continents already widely colonised by Europe or to a future part of the U.S. that

was neither a state or territory in 1823. The answer is to be found near the end of

the message in a separate homily, coming after a lengthy description of domestic

affairs. In this longer section, Monroe addressed the relationship between the

United States, Europe, and South America, declaring solidarity with the recently

independent South American republics. Monroe’s struggle consists of two

binaries, democracy and the monarchical “Holly Alliance,” but also a spatial

difference. Monroe made clear that the United States would not interfere with the

struggle for democracy wherever it arose. He contrasted “events in that quarter of

the globe . . . with which we have so much intercourse and from which we derive

our origin, we have always been anxious and interested spectators,”364 with

“movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected,

and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial

observers.”365

Old World tyranny versus New World democracy presented interesting

contradictions and hypocrisies, on the one hand advancing an ideology of equality 361 Ibid. 362 John Quincy Adams, “to Henry Middleton” (5 July 1820) in Bemis, John Quincy Adams, 365. 363 Monroe, “Seventh Annual Message to Congress,” 14. 364 Ibid., 22. 365 Ibid.

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and on the other practising domestic policies of inequality, including the

resettlement of native Indians, the slave trade, and the doubt often expressed in

the U.S. that South Americans were racially incapable of self-rule. Monroe’s

hemispheric solidarity contained a measure of imperialism. By referring to South

American republics as “our southern brethren,”366 Monroe put in place the

“America/Américas” myth,367 a strategy of “control through sameness.”368 Thus

this statement of protection became through interpretation and reinterpretation a

strategy of control.369

The Monroe Doctrine’s effect was striking in the construction of a Western

Hemisphere and its relative locations of Europe and North and South America, all

crucial to the formation of the ideology of exceptionalism. It was an ideology

which was able to simultaneously claim radical separation from European

colonialism whilst also enabling cultural, military, and economic hegemony.

The move to world power and the duty of civilisation

By 1900, the United States led the world in the extraction of raw materials,

produced more manufactured goods and steel than any other nation, led in the

production and consumption of consumer goods, and was also a leading exporter

to the rest of the world.370 But the rise of American power on the international

stage does not necessarily tell us about her foreign policy. In retrospect, the rise to

imperial power by the United States at the end of the nineteenth century seems to

have been almost accidental. President McKinley noted that America had

proceeded without any intention to acquire the Philippines. What is apparent is

that the process was not started by security concerns.371 America was redefining

herself for a new industrialised age in which she was materially stronger.

Although this chapter has shown the earlier rejection of European models of

366 Ibid., 23. 367 Eldon Kenworthy, America/Américas: Myth in the Making of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), xiv. 368 Ibid. 369 Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, makes a similar argument about the discourse of ‘Western civilization’ as a mechanism for post-Second World War control and integration of West Germany. 370 Frank A. Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 17. 371 Ibid.

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imperialism, it seems hard to imagine America’s ‘imperial moment’ having

existed without an explicit European model.

Although the enthusiasm for imperialism at the end of the century did not last

long, it did leave the United States as a world power, one of a small group

“directly interested in all parts of the world and whose voices must be listened to

everywhere.”372 But in the process of increasing American international

involvement, America was not simply becoming another great power. Rather,

some progressives believed that, in a period of profound change, the world was

coming to resemble America.373 World power did not automatically mean

following the European model of competitive expansion; in its place could be

peace, prosperity, and liberal democratic growth, although by 1900 a new world

view had yet to be convincingly argued. As Ninkovich conceives it, Roosevelt’s

view was that “the great statesman must be a man of imagination,”374 by which he

meant that the old ‘common sense’ of foreign policy would have to be

reinvented.375

Roosevelt was still constrained by the non-entanglement consensus that had held

sway the previous century. Thus he was confined in justifying what became

known as the ‘Roosevelt Corollary’ in traditional terms. Nonetheless, the

corollary expanded the Monroe Doctrine into its modern form. It used the

supposedly ‘flexible’ Monroe Doctrine to justify intervention in Latin Americas

even when European powers were not attempting to gain territory. Roosevelt did

so in a reworking of Monroe’s original “southern brethren” formulation, claiming

that “our interests and those of our southern neighbours are in reality identical.”376

Thus the corollary not only kept Europe out but also made the United States the

ultimate authority in the region. For Walter LaFeber, Roosevelt’s invocation of

372 Archibald Cary Coolidge, The United States as a World Power (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 148. 373 Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century, 22. 374 Theodore Roosevelt in ibid., 24. 375 Ibid. 376 Theodore Roosevelt, “Fourth Annual Message” (6 December 1904), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29545&st=&st1=#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 03/08/11].

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the Monroe Doctrine was a key turning point, when its protective intentions were

inverted into a statement of control.377 As Quinn suggests:

it was a fundamental assumption of this model for order that the prerogative of identifying and acting on the ‘common interest’ lay with the United States alone. This unarticulated but central principle of unaccountable-yet-legitimate leadership is key to understanding the ideology of American interventionism that would follow.378

Of key interest was Roosevelt’s concept of ‘civilisation’, which was paramount in

constructing the Corollary’s ‘legitimacy’. The Corollary was not made from the

position of hemispheric detachment but from a universal frame of reference in

which ‘civilisation’ had conferred upon the United States a police-like power.

Though this was an inherently imperialist doctrine, it was prompted by hostility to

the diplomacy of imperialism. Roosevelt’s thinking about international relations

was dominated by a belief in a global process of civilisation that advanced great

power cooperation and imperialism, in parallel with his suspicion of imperialism

in the western hemisphere.379

Roosevelt shared with other progressives his belief that a nation was truly free

only if its democracy followed the American model. Theoretically free societies

could vary, but in reality liberty was not viewed as allowing for different paths of

development. Instead, it was taken to entail a narrow range of outcomes, all of

them congruent with the economic and political model of the United States and a

particular world order. In other words, “liberty for a state ought to produce

something resembling liberalism within that state, for such was the meaning of

‘progress’.”380

Woodrow Wilson, the abandonment of hemispheric detachment and a “peace

of justice”

Not long before his inauguration Woodrow Wilson is alleged to have told a friend

“It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign

377 Walter LaFeber, “The Evolution of the Monroe Doctrine from Monroe to Reagan,” in Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams, ed Lloyd C. Gardner (Corvallis, Ore.: Oregon State University Press, 1986), 1. 378 Quinn, U.S. Foreign Policy in Context, 75. 379 Frank A. Ninkovich, “Roosevelt, Theodore – Civilization as Ideology,” Diplomatic History, 10, no. 3 (1986): 221–45. 380 Quinn, U.S. Foreign Policy in Context, 78.

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affairs.”381 That irony was fully realised. The First World War was a watershed

event in the history of U.S. foreign policy. In contrast to the limited imperial

events of 1898 it marked the start of America as a world power and the end of the

longstanding American pursuit of hemispheric separation. In demanding that

America take a more involved interest in European affairs, it also presented an

unprecedented opportunity to pursue radical reform of the ideological basis of the

European and world order.

However, Wilson’s immediate response was to take shelter in tradition. In

proclaiming American neutrality in the War, he declared that:

The United States must be neutral in fact as well as name during these days that are to try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.382

Neutrality was meant as an assertion that the interests of the United States were

fundamentally different from those of the belligerents. In legal terms, neutral

rights meant a right to trade with the belligerents or anyone else; this meant that

only legally defined ‘contraband’ could be seized. In other words, commerce was

expected to remain neutral despite the war.383

Privately Wilson was sympathetic with Britain and believed that if she, Russia, or

France dictated the postwar settlement it would not be at odds with his conception

of America’s interest.384 Although legally correct, Wilson’s vision of neutrality

was at cross-purposes with his vision of civilisation. Traditional neutrality was

rooted in a narrow conception of national interest. Wilson was concerned with

reconciling this selfish doctrine with America’s role in promoting civilisation. As

he conceived of it, neutrality should posses a noble and universal validity. As he

381 Quoted in John Milton Cooper, “‘An Irony of Fate’: Woodrow Wilson’s Pre-World War I Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History, 3, no. 4 (1979): 425. 382 Woodrow Wilson, “Message on Neutrality” (19 August 1914), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65382#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 03/08/11]. 383 Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire, 307. 384 Herbert Bruce Brougham, “Memo of an interview with Wilson by Herbert Bruce Brougham” (14 December 1914), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 31:459.

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put it “I am interested in neutrality because there is something so much greater to

do than fight.”385

Whilst neutral rights became the casus belli for America, Wilson had a more

ideological sense of neutrality grounded in civilisational terms and the ability to

mediate between the belligerents, rather than just to guarantee trade.386 The

chance for mediation was never very good, as the belligerents shared neither a

vision of postwar peace (which might have compelled them to put down arms) nor

Wilson’s view of America as peacemaker. Whatever chance there was for

America to make peace vanished entirely in 1917.

The experience formed Wilson’s strategic view and by the time America entered

the War he had decided that the balance of power in Europe had been so critically

damaged that even if it survived it could never re-establish great power security.

As a liberal optimist, Wilson hoped and assumed that the balance of power would

not last. He was not a misguided idealist, as he is sometimes cast. Both as an

academic and politician he was thoroughly grounded in the concept of the balance

of power but he did not view it as an unchanging natural law which nations

ignored to their detriment. Since the balance of power was a human creation it,

too, was subject to change. His view was perhaps not surprising, as there was no

American tradition of raison d’état. It was a European construct which (as this

chapter has already demonstrated) American foreign and domestic policy had

strenuously avoided.387

The other important point to tease out of Wilson’s thought was that the failure of

American neutrality and the emergence of a World war meant that great power

politics and, more specifically, conflict beyond trade and the maintenance of

empires were now global. As a result, the geographic isolation America had

enjoyed was threatened by the potential for the war to end with a single power

385 Woodrow Wilson, “Remarks to the Associated Press in New York City” (20 April 1915), http://www.archive.org/stream/americanismwoodr00unitiala#page/10/mode/2up [accessed 03/08/11]. 386 Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century, 55. 387 Frank A. Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 46.

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dominating Europe.388 Wilson’s rhetoric after America entered the war introduced

the concept of a global threat into American foreign-policy lexicon.

An unanticipated shift in American grand strategy reflected this new conception

of the world. During the years of neutrality, American war planning had been

based on the traditional idea of the threat of invasion of the Western Hemisphere.

The logic of pursuing simply neutral rights “ought logically to have been a naval

war”;389 instead, America sent a military force to Europe, which was met with

shock by the political elites.

Wilson’s solution for postwar peace was collective security based on no less than

‘world opinion’. But this was less idealistic than it sounded; Wilson’s view of

world opinion was circumscribed, ideologically conservative, and less than global

in reach. “Collective security based on world public opinion . . . [was] far more

limited – a new language of power that relied, as had the old, upon the sanction of

force.”390

For Wilson, America was the linchpin of world opinion. The assumption of U.S.

primacy helped Wilson sustain his belief that the institutions and norms of the

new world order would not clash with U.S. interests or wishes. As with his

concept of the Monroe Doctrine, he conflated U.S. interests with those of other

nations, this reconception of the Monroe Doctrine later serving as the basis of

Wilson’s global new world order. “True freedom and independence meant the

maintenance [of] a liberal, democratic capitalist order.”391 He assumed that U.S.

wishes and the collective will of the free world would perennially coincide. “His

approach to foreign policy was at once unilateral and universal.”392

Wilson did not consider that the United States might find itself in conflict with the

new order of international institutions and law that he had planned because he

conceived of that order as a universalisation of U.S. standards. The purpose of the

new system was to bring other nations into line with the United States, not vice

388 Ibid., 47. 389 Ibid., 54. 390 Ibid., 62. 391 Quinn, U.S. Foreign Policy in Context, 94. 392 Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 57.

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versa. In making his case for the assumption of global leadership, Wilson

projected a familiar sense of national destiny:

The isolation of the United States is at an end, not because we chose to go into the politics of the world, but because, by the sheer genius of this people and the growth of our power, we have become a determining factor in the history of mankind. And after you have become a determining factor you cannot remain isolated, whether you want to or not. Isolation ended by the processes of history, not by the processes of our independent choice, and the processes of history merely fulfilled the prediction of the men who founded our republic.393

Wilson’s presidency marked a turning point in U.S. foreign policy, even if it was

imbued with familiar strands of thought. A more engaged global foreign policy

had been likely as the country increased in economic power and military potential.

The Roosevelt years had already made apparent the huge growth in U.S. power

potential, but Roosevelt had remained constrained by pre-existing norms of U.S.

ideology regarding separation of spheres of influence. Under Wilson, The First

World War ruptured the international order and the way America conceptualised

its role within it.

Following the path established by Roosevelt, the United States believed that it

could increase the freedom of foreign peoples by interfering in their national

affairs so as to generate the conditions needed for liberty. This belief was rooted

in the now-familiar view that only certain forms of political order were

compatible with progress and that the United States had a responsibility to guide

other nations in their exercise of freedom. Under Wilsonian ideology, it was

therefore legitimate to seek to build a cooperative system of states under

American hegemony.

From World War to Cold War

After Wilson’s political decline the United States eschewed the level of

engagement he had sought. Although the United States was firmly involved in

European economic affairs, it avoided military and political alliances.

Ideologically the country returned to the detached relations of Jeffersonian

393 Woodrow Wilson, “Speech in Des Moines, Iowa” (6 September 1919), in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 63:77.

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consensus. Despite the passage of a series of neutrality acts aimed at avoiding the

1917 casus belli that had dragged the United States into the First World War, the

country ultimately did not stay out of the Second World War.394

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) combined, not always logically, a deeply

rooted Wilsonian disposition with Theodore Roosevelt’s geopolitical nuance.

Thus, FDR’s new version of Wilson’s League of Nations included Theodore’s

idea of a concert of great powers exerting peaceful influence and vigilantly

supervising their respective regions, or ‘four policemen’. The massive antifascist

alliance of the Second World War would be transformed, when the criminal

aggressors had been vanquished, into a stable order of cooperation and mutual

interest, headed by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, and

perhaps also a reconstituted China.395

FDR’s vision did not come to pass. Only the United States and the Soviet Union

emerged stronger from the war. The resultant change to the international system

was unprecedented. Before the war it had been based on a number of great

powers; by 1945 only the United States and Soviet Union really rivalled each

other in material or ideological terms. Domestically the war had changed the

views of U.S. leaders. The decision to reject Wilson’s legacy in favour of

defensive isolation now looked like a colossal error. “It had allowed a war that

might have been contained in size by early American commitment to engulf half

the world before dragging the United States in anyway.”396

The noninterventionists had been wrong in deeming U.S. intervention

unnecessary, but they had anticipated the complications that would ensue once the

United States permanently committed to a world order. Their predictions of U.S.

totalitarianism proved unfounded, but they were correct in believing that the old

republic would vanish with the war and a new United States would take its place.

The nascent Truman administration struggled with America’s limited experience

in Great Power politics. Within a few years, the United States moved from robust

wartime cooperation with the Soviets to NSC-68’s comprehensive diagnosis of the

394 Quinn, U.S. Foreign Policy in Context, 114. 395 Ninkovich, Modernity and Power, 123. 396 Quinn, U.S. Foreign Policy in Context, 116.

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nature of the Soviet threat and a programme of response. The nature of the

diagnosis showed just how far U.S. international thought had travelled, as the

threat from the Soviet Union was suddenly believed to endanger freedom at a

global level.

Conclusion

Unlike the words imperialism, nationalism, and internationalism, which did not

come into widespread use until the nineteenth century, the terms, empire, nation,

and Union have signified important categories of American political discourse

since 1776.397 In the words of Meining, these political terms are “an essential

generalised shorthand for elusive formations that are continuously under

construction and alteration.”398 The tension among imperialism, nationalism, and

internationalism has been a significant feature of American political discourse.

The debate continues regarding who Americans are and how that question should

inform domestic and international policy.

Some traditional accounts of U.S. diplomatic history have stressed the adherence

to “Continental Americanism” by American statesmen until the 1890s, keeping

America out of great power international politics.399 It is an account which still

maintains some influence and in that narrative the United States moved from

isolationism to internationalism only in the twentieth century.400 Such an account

is wrong to dismiss the significance of internationalist currents between the

republic’s founding and 1914. As this chapter has demonstrated, the international

environment was a concern so fundamental that it conditioned the formation of

the Union and the image of the Union remained linked to the perturbations of

internationalist thought in the United States.

The sense that the breakdown of European and world order in the aftermath of the

First World War had returned the U.S. to its original predicament was part of the

U.S. internationalist sensibility. In 1918 Horace Kallen, a member of Wilson’s

397 Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire, 4. 398 D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, 1986), 2, xv. 399 Charles A. Beard, A Foreign Policy for America (New York; London: Knopf 1940). 400 Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1997).

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‘Inquiry’, stated that America’s independent states in 1776 “were in precisely the

same position and confronted precisely the same problems, in principle, as the

present states and governments of the world.”401 That is not to say that many

voices wanted a world society amongst ‘the civilised powers’. U.S.

internationalism would have to clear a new path between the need for a union

among peace-loving nations and the totalising of a world state. In response to the

exigencies of America’s new world role in the twentieth century, the unionist

paradigm was neither abandoned nor uncritically accepted but was modified and

restated to fit the new circumstances.

This chapter outlined the development of the theory and practice of U.S.

international political thought from the founding of the republic to the end of the

Second World War. It showed that questions of international politics and the U.S.

experience of Union were interdependent and examined how this experience

influenced America’s international stance. In short, there is an intimate

relationship between how Americans have viewed the republic and how they have

attempted to fashion foreign policy.

The last section of the chapter has examined how themes of twentieth-century

internationalism had far deeper roots in U.S. political thought than is sometimes

suggested. The distinctive American Union always had an internationalist

dimension because it was constructed on a federative principle according to which

a genuine federation was neither an empire nor simply a civic society but an

assemblage of societies large enough to provide security for all while preserving

the individuality and independence of each. It occupied a moderate place between

anarchy and tyranny.

401 Horace Meyer Kallen, The Structure of Lasting Peace: An Inquiry into the Motives of War and Peace (Boston, Mass.: Marshall Jones Company, 1918), 136–7.

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Chapter 4. Exceptionalism and Containment, 1946–1950

Starting in early 1947, American grand strategy underwent a reorientation on a

global scale. The twenty-minute delivery of the Truman Doctrine made public

what Washington political insiders had known for at least a year: a new grand

strategy of containment had replaced Rooseveltian internationalism. This change

heralded the onset of the Cold War and marked the first move in an ideological

reordering of American grand strategy around the policy of containment, which

would find final expression in NSC-68.402

President Truman was nevertheless critical of the emergent popular notion403 that

American policy had suddenly shifted in 1947 or that his doctrine had resulted

from a sudden intensification of rivalry with the Soviet Union.404 Rather, Truman

contested that, politically, events had been leading in that direction since his April

1945 talks with Molotov.405 This chapter explores Truman’s contention that the

strategic change of the Truman Doctrine in fact manifested in the context of prior

ideological contestation.

Using Truman’s timeline of containment, this chapter will examine discourse

about the structure of the postwar international system and America’s role within

that system. The chapter will investigate the development of this discourse and the

genre of U.S. international political thought across media such as speeches,

newspaper articles, policy papers, and books by public intellectuals and

402 White House, “A Report to the National Security Council – NSC-68” (April 12, 1950) [hereafter NSC-68] http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/sectioned.php?documentid=10–1&pagenumber=1&groupid=1 [accessed 03/08/11]. 403 The New York Times, for example, argued that the “Truman Doctrine” represented “a dramatic change” in American foreign policy: Felix Belair Jr., “Truman Acts to Save Nations from Red Rule,” New York Times, 13 March 1947; Felix Belair Jr., “New Policy Set Up: President’s Blunt Plea to Combat ‘Coercion’ as World Peril,” New York Times, 13 March 1947. 404 Disagreements between Washington and Moscow over the postwar settlement had started during the War itself. For accounts of the wartime relationship, see Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Robert J. Maddox, From War to Cold War: The Education of Harry S. Truman (Boulder, Colo.; London: Westview, 1988). 405 The volatile meeting is detailed in Harry S. Truman, Memoirs. Year of Decisions, 1945, British edn. Vol. 1 (Bungay: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955), 82–5.

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policymakers who formed a small elite.406 The chapter will show the degree to

which the Truman Doctrine and NSC-68 were fundamental ideological

innovations in U.S. foreign policy that can be understood only by placing them

within the context of contemporary discourse. These innovations can then be

understood as illocutionary, political acts.

The chapter’s analysis will be based on a Skinnerian contextualist approach. This

analysis will show that containment was predicated on a number of assumptions

based, in part, on an innovative reworking of the writings of a series of high-

profile intellectuals and policymakers such as Walter Lippmann, Henry Luce, and

George Kennan. This chapter examines these individuals because they

significantly contributed to a debate conducted both in public and in private by

remarkably few participants. The chapter will employ a contextualist

methodology, providing detailed portraits of individual thinkers as well an

analysis of significant shifts in the language of politics that shaped the contours of

American exceptionalism.

The chapter will refer to American ‘international political thought’. That phrase is

deliberately expansive, encompassing the complex of self-consciously articulated

languages employed to envisage, interrogate, and potentially answer the questions

raised by American involvement in international affairs. Political discourse rarely

comprises a systematic, consistent body of doctrine. As Raymond Geuss

observed, political theories are often, in practice, “historically congealed kinds of

rhetorical appeal which make use of quasi-propositional fragments.”407

In the language of Quentin Skinner, this chapter will suggest that the architects of

the policy of containment were ‘innovating ideologists’ who manipulated

discourse in order to serve specific political strategies. For the sake of clarity, the

innovating ideologists in this chapter include Truman himself, as well as Paul

Nitze, who chaired the NSC study group which produced NSC-68, and Dean

Acheson, who was a key figure in the conception and drafting of the Truman

406 For a narrative history of that elite see Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2006); Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas. The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made: Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, Mccloy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). 407 Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 157.

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Doctrine. According to Skinner, “It is in large part by rhetorical manipulation . . .

that any society succeeds in establishing, upholding, questioning or altering its

moral identity.”408

Within the historiography, containment has been characterised as “the American

effort, by military, political and economic means[,] to resist communist expansion

throughout the world.”409 After the publication of Kennan’s memoirs began in the

late 1960s,410 the scholarly debate centred around what Kennan had meant by

‘containment’ and the degree to which American grand strategy applied his vision

of containment.

In the late 1960s, Kennan protested that the press had unjustly elevated

containment to the status of a doctrine. However, until the late 1980s,

‘containment’ remained the pre-eminent description of early Cold War U.S.

strategy among historians and policymakers. The historical debate remained

preoccupied with questions of the Cold War’s origins and, ultimately, of

responsibility. Amongst historians the term containment was used

indiscriminately by orthodox,411 revisionist,412 and post-revisionist413 scholars,

often without attempts at definition or to analyse its linguistic innovation as a

form of political innovation and new conceptual ordering of the world.414

408 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 148, 149. 409 Barton J. Bernstein, “Containment,” in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy: Studies of the Principal Movements and Ideas, ed. Alexander DeConde (New York: Scribner, 1978), 191. 410 George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (London,: Hutchinson, 1968); George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1950–63 (Boston, Mass.: Little Brown and Co., 1973). 411 Louis Joseph Halle, The Cold War as History (New York: Harper, 1967), 107. 412 Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), 63–4. 413 Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 235. 414 For examples and discussion of each school see Chapter 2 of this thesis. As discussed in that chapter, the debate between the orthodox, revisionist, and post-revisionist historians was primarily about the issue of blame for the start of the Cold War. Orthodox historians blamed the Soviet Union, revisionists blamed American expansion. The revisionist stance was split between the ‘soft’ revisionism of those such as Walter Lippmann (The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy [New York: Harper, 1947]), who suggested that there had been an American failure of democracy, and ‘hard’ revisionist critiques which were largely (but not exclusively) associated with the ‘New Left’ and included those of Gabriel Kolko (The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 [New York: Random House, 1968]) and Williams (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy). These accounts emphasized the need for continuous American expansion both political but, more fundamentally for them, economic. For an analysis of the debate see Robert James Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973). Post-revisionism has included a number of different commitments, united by an attempt to bring more critical subtlety to the argument and for some

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Some revisionist scholars did attempt to grapple with containment but did so

within the same positivist paradigm as those preceding them. Chief amongst these

was John Lewis Gaddis in his seminal book, Strategies of Containment, whose

stated aim was to “‘reinterpret’ U.S. national security from a ‘strategic

perspective’ by focusing on the ‘central preoccupation of postwar national

security policy’ – the idea of containment.”415 Yet he limited his discussion of

containment’s formation under Truman to the shift in military strategy after the

drafting of NSC-68, effectively ignoring containment’s ideological origins and

illocutionary significance.

Gaddis allowed for the idea that a more aggressive policy was outlined within the

strategy of containment. However, his argument was fundamentally proleptic: he

reasoned ex post facto that because containment never amounted in practice to

more than ‘balancing’ it had never been seriously considered as an all-

encompassing global grand strategy. Relying heavily on Kennan’s writing for his

interpretation, Gaddis suggested that containment was the most coherent strategy

devised for dealing with the Soviets during the Cold War. That claim may well

have been true from Truman’s perspective but Gaddis committed two errors: he

overestimated the direct relevance of Kennan’s work to policymaking, and he

bestowed upon Kennan’s early writing more coherence than it could possibly

have had before the existence of his later work. In fact, Kennan himself was

acutely aware of and acknowledged his limited influence, and that many

individuals within the Truman administration held a strategic vision different

from his own and lobbied vigorously for Eastern Europe’s unconditional

surrender.416 Kennan’s voice was far from the most influential, even if we

concede that some of his analysis was later appropriated.

Although the scholarship of early Cold War American grand strategy has

significantly advanced since Strategies of Containment, this scholarship has

authors to move away from the issue of blame (an aim which this thesis shares but pursues from a different conceptual and methodological basis). See this chapter, footnote 420, for examples of post-revisionist historians and IR constructivists who have attempted to bring ideology into their analyses but have done so without attributing blame for the start of the Cold War. 415 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), viii. 416 Walter L. Hixson, “Reassessing Kennan After the Fall of the Soviet Union: The Vindication of X?” Historian, 59, no. 4 (1997): 849–59.

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largely repeated Gaddis’s mistake: it has applied retrospectively defined analytical

frameworks in order to categorise American grand strategy in both the late 1940s

and early 1950s. Despite the recent trend toward recognising competing ideas for

waging the Cold War, many contemporary scholars have consciously structured

their work around a unitary, hegemonic pattern in a quest for a historical order

that could not have existed at the time.417 In other words, containment, rollback,

liberation, and other characterisations of American grand strategy became tools

for imposing order on a past that included competing and chaotic visions of

international political order.

Skinner’s alternative approach demands that political texts must be understood

according to their authors’ intentions, otherwise it would be impossible to

determine what was genuinely distinctive about an individual work, and the

interpreter would not notice that an author was declining to employ a

conventionally accepted argument. According to Skinner, political ideas should

not be dismissed as mere rationalisations of political action; prevailing ideas can

determine political behaviour. Prevailing political assumptions and inherited

concepts thus limit the kind of opposition that ‘innovating ideologists’ are able to

marshal.418

This chapter will place the early Cold War American grand strategy of

containment within a contextual framework to examine the Truman Doctrine as

an act of ideological innovation. Apart from an examination of the historiography

of containment, already considered above, the chapter will explore the ideological

context via wartime and postwar discourse. These strands include the triumphant

heralding of the ‘American century’ by Luce, publisher of three of the most

influential postwar magazines; the writings of Lippmann, the period’s pre-

eminent political commentator, who merged his early critique of American

moralism with a realist defence of postwar cosmopolitanism; Woodrow Wilson’s

rhetoric of freedom, which provided ideological tropes used by containment; and

417 For example, Beatrice Heuser, Western “Containment” Policies in the Cold War: The Yugoslav Case, 1948–53 (New York: Routledge, 1989); Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Leffler, Preponderance of Power; Lucas, Freedom’s War; Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). 418 See Chapter 1 for a discussion of contextualist methodology and Chapter 2 for an extended analysis of the Skinnerian project.

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Kennan’s “Long Telegram”419 to the U.S. State Department and his article “The

Sources of Soviet Conduct,” written under the pseudonym ‘X’ and commonly

referred to as the “X article.”420 Both the “long telegram” and the “X article”

outlined a vision of containment and, more importantly, a vision of an intransigent

enemy, which the Truman Doctrine utilised in its act of ideological innovation.

Finally, the chapter will analyse the speech that announced the Truman Doctrine

and NSC-68, which both anchored and extended this ideological stance. It will

show the degree to which these documents represented both continuity with the

discourse of U.S. international political thought and ideological novelty.

Step one of contextual analysis: what was the author doing in writing a text

in relation to other available texts that made up the ideological context?

This section provides a sketch of the ‘available’ texts in the period before the

declaration of the Truman Doctrine and also before the writing of NSC-68. These

were the two key texts, which this chapter contends were ideologically innovative,

and their innovative ideological reinterpretation of the world allowed an

expansive version of containment to be pursued. This chapter makes no claim to

contextual completeness, which is a task that is beyond the scope of a study which

aims to survey a number of periods. However, the texts and authors under survey

were chosen because they were so widely read at the time and, in the case of

Luce, their opinions dispersed over a broad range of publications. As a result this

chapter suggests that they were representative of major strands of ‘conventional’

American thought.

Melvyn Leffler asserts that:

At the time of Roosevelt’s death American officials did not regard the Soviet Union as an enemy and were not frightened by Soviet military prowess. Soviet power paled next to that of the United States. . . . [The

419 George F. Kennan, “Telegram to James Byrne at U.S. State Department” (22 February 1946), http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/index.php?documentdate=1946–02–22&documentid=6–6&studycollectionid=&pagenumber=1 [accessed 21/05/11]. Hereafter “The long telegram”. 420 ‘X’ [George F. Kennan], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs (July 1947), 566–82. Hereafter, ‘The X Article’.

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Soviets had] no capacity to attack American territory and had no ability to inflict damage on the American economy.421

Nevertheless, the emergence of the concept of Cold War as a discrete taxonomy

was intrinsically ideological, based on FDR’s theme of freedom via the Atlantic

Charter combined with a “presupposition that no settlement or ‘peace’ in the

traditional sense . . . was possible.”422 Whether or not the Cold War was, from the

outset, a U.S. project is of coincidental significance to this thesis. The point is that

the Cold War quickly became defined in ideological terms. In the West the

ideology at stake was U.S.-style liberal capitalism, combined with a proselytising

interpretation of America’s exceptional role in the world.

New approaches of differing philosophical commitments, in the fields of both

International Relations and diplomatic history, have sought to bring ideology back

into the narrative of U.S. foreign policy.423 Scott Lucas makes the important point

that orthodox Cold War narratives have not normally allowed the possibility that a

U.S. ideology was at play in the Cold War424 and present ‘Americanisation’ as a

one-way process in which foreign peoples welcomed the commodities and values

of liberal democracy. In other words, U.S. Cold War ideology was so successful

that it sanitised the history it was creating.425

This is not to suggest that there was no ideological context during the pre-1945

period; indeed, this section is engaged with recreating that context. The U.S.

identification of Germany and Japan as the primary enemies during the Second

World War had promoted the Grand Alliance and the associated rehabilitation of

the Soviet Union in the United States. The extension of Lend-Lease to the Soviet

Union in 1941 went hand in hand with Roosevelt’s desire to seek Soviet support

421 Melvyn Leffler, “National Security,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 135–136. 422 Anders Stephanson, “The Cold War Considered as a U.S. Project,” in Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War: Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations, ed. Silvio Pons and Federico Romero (London: Cass, 2005), 55. 423 See Hogan, A Cross of Iron; Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy; Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy; Leffler, Preponderance of Power. 424 Lucas, “Beyond Freedom, Beyond Control,”. 425 This is not to deny the existence of the voice of dissent. In fact, as this chapter suggests, both Lippmann and Kennan were amongst those who expressed differing viewpoints at this point in time. Even more radical critiques of America would emerge from the ‘New Left’ in the 1960s and 1970s. This thesis is in part an examination of how some voices of dissent, on both sides of the political spectrum, became co-opted into ideological uniformity.

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for a postwar order compatible with liberal democracy. Although Roosevelt’s

personal political skill kept the Grand Alliance alive during the Second World

War, peaceful coexistence would ultimately prove incompatible with American

national identity; for the second time in a generation, an American president

would fail in his attempt to achieve his vision for a postwar new world order.

The Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms had established a wartime discourse

largely in line with American liberal democratic values, including free trade,

collective security against belligerents, and other ideals loosely inherited from

Wilson’s Fourteen Points.426 Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (from want, from fear, of

speech, and of worship)427 resonated not just with Americans but with the

constituents of the nascent United Nations, whose declaration committed its

members to the principles of the Atlantic Charter.

The wartime strategy of unconditional surrender reassured Stalin, who distrusted

his allies and suspected that the Atlantic Charter was largely directed at the Soviet

Union. Unconditional surrender was a trope appropriated from Civil War general

Ulysses Grant and fitted with America’s history of comprehensively

exterminating foreign enemies, as during the American Indian Wars associated

with domestic expansion westward, the Mexican–merican War (1846–8), and the

hunting down of Filipinos.

The New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin later called

unconditional surrender one of the great mistakes of the Second World War.428

Although it allowed Roosevelt to maintain the Grand Alliance with minimal U.S.

casualties, unconditional surrender encouraged Germany and Japan to extend the

war as long as possible and, according to Baldwin, enabled the Soviets to extend

their campaign across Europe.429 This chapter goes further by suggesting that the

notion of unconditional surrender contributed to containment’s uncompromising

character.

426 Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century, 71, 132. 427 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Annual Address to Congress – The ‘Four Freedoms’” (6 January 1941), http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/od4frees.html [accessed 21/05/11]. 428 Hanson Weightman Baldwin, Great Mistakes of the War (London: A. Redman, 1950), 13. 429 Ibid.

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The wartime discourse of the Grand Alliance remained in place through the 1945

Yalta Conference, which kept alive Roosevelt’s vision of a postwar order

overseen by four enforcers: the United States, Great Britain, the U.S.S.R., and

nationalist China. Stalin signed on to the Yalta Declaration and its vision of

‘liberated’ Europe, pledging to support the UN. Roosevelt triumphantly declared

that the Yalta Declaration had eliminated “spheres of influence and balances of

power and all the other expedients which have been tried for centuries – and have

failed.”430 Yalta would represent “the best the Big Three could do to hold their

alliance together, and it was not enough,” Lloyd Gardner states.431 Effectively,

Europe was ideologically and materially partitioned before the Cold War began in

earnest.

The myth of U.S. universalism precluded America’s accommodating an extended

Soviet sphere of influence. Many Americans believed that the United States was

God’s chosen nation, obligated to assume world leadership and spread its way of

life. Before intervention in the Second World War, Luce reaffirmed America’s

national identity in his 1940 bestseller American Century.432 Much as John

O’Sullivan had trumpeted Manifest Destiny during the Mexican–American

War,433 a century later Luce, with no greater subtlety, called on the United States

to “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we

see fit and by such means as we see fit.”434 Truman employed a similar trope after

the war: “[n]ow this great Republic – the greatest in history, the greatest the sun

has ever shone upon – is charged with leadership in the world for the welfare of

the whole world as well as our own welfare.”435

430 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address to Congress on the Yalta Conference” (1 March 1945), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16591&st=&st1=#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 03/08/11]. 431 Lloyd C. Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Partition of Europe, from Munich to Yalta (London: John Murray, 1993), 237. 432 Originally published as Henry Robinson Luce, “The American Century,” Life, 17 February 1941. It was also reprinted in full in the New York Times (4 March 1941, 14–15), and condensed in Reader’s Digest (April 1941, 45–9). Luce’s article also appears in U.S. Congress, House, 77th Cong., 1st sess., 5 March 1941, Congressional Record, 87: 1828–31. Further references are to its republication in book form – Henry Robinson Luce, The American Century (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941). 433 Julius W. Pratt, “The Origin of ‘Manifest Destiny’,” The American Historical Review, 32, no. 4 (1927): 796–7. 434 Luce, The American Century, 23. 435 Harry S. Truman, “Rear Platform and Other Informal Remarks in Ohio” (11 October 1948), http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=1981 [accessed 03/08/11].

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Henry Luce’s “American century”

The antecedent of Truman’s grandiose evocation of the Republic’s mission was

evident in Luce’s writings.436 Born to missionary parents in China, Luce had risen

to prominence as publisher of Time, Life, Fortune, and the documentary series

March of Time. With a worldview shaped by strong Protestant belief and fervent

faith in America’s God-ordained global mission,437 Luce became one of

America’s most influential private citizens, and he relentlessly lobbied for greater

U.S. intervention in foreign affairs. As a Republican insider, Luce received

unprecedented access to confidential material.438 Life’s popular appeal during the

Second World War cemented his position.439 More concerned with foreign affairs

than with the daily operation of his publications, Luce claimed responsibility as

editor-in-chief for all of his magazines’ contents.

Luce’s magazines had considerable cultural importance after the Second World

War, which Luce had foreseen as precipitating U.S. global hegemony. The

American Century dominated the 17 February 1941 issue of Life. In a

groundbreaking editorial, Luce argued that Americans must reconcile themselves

to the burdens of America’s being the world’s most powerful country. As he saw

it, Americans were unable to face this fact either practically or morally. The

twentieth century had become the American century; therefore, Americans were

obligated to:

accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full import of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.440

436 Luce’s “American Century” was a call to action rather than an analysis of the preceding four decades. In Luce, “The American Century,” 26, he wrote about the “golden opportunity handed to us on the proverbial silver platter . . .. . . we bungled it in the 1920s and in the confusions of the 1930s we killed it.” 437 On the life and thought of Luce see Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York, Scribner, 1972); James L. Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media, Twayne’s Twentieth-Century American Biography Series; No. 5 (Boston, Mass.: Twayne Publishers, 1987). 438 Robert Edwin Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 67, 91, 124, 170. 439 Brinkley, The Publisher, 303. 440 Luce, American Century, 7.

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Luce took issue with fellow interventionists who emphasised an Anglo-American

postwar partnership.441 He argued that the United States would be the senior

partner by virtue of a generation of economic ascendency. Luce saw isolationists

as shirking America’s economic and political responsibility on a global scale.442

Many of Luce’s justifications for expansionism were unexceptional insofar as

they revived nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny arguments that the United

States share its political institutions and liberties with the world.

But Luce did not specify the contours of this putative American responsibility.

The republic would not have a boundless role, he admitted: “our only alternative

to isolationism is not to undertake to police the whole world nor to impose

democratic institutions on all mankind.”443 After all, the postwar world would still

include tyrannies, and warfare would not be eliminated by America alone or some

“parliament of men.”444 However, Luce offered an expansive assessment of

America’s postwar role; although freedom would not reign everywhere, he

expected it to flourish in most of the world:

the indivisibility of the contemporary world . . . Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space, but freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny. Peace cannot endure unless it prevails over a very large part of the world. Justice will come near to losing all meaning in the minds of men unless Justice can have approximately the same fundamental meanings in many lands and among many peoples.445

As Luce instructed his employees at Time, America stood for one value above all

others:

If we had to choose one word out of the whole vocabulary of human experience to associate with America – surely it would not be hard to choose the word. For surely the word is Freedom . . . Without Freedom, America is untranslatable . . . And therefore it seems to me that we can sum up the whole of editorial attitudes and principles in one word ‘Freedom’.446

441 Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, 176. 442 Luce, American Century, 24. 443 Ibid., 36. 444 Ibid., 30. 445 Ibid., 30–31. 446 Henry R. Luce, “‘The Practice of Freedom,’ Memorandum to Time Magazine Staff” (New York: Time Inc. Archives, 1943).

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Luce’s American Century had been inspired partly by a Lippmann essay

published in Time two years earlier: “The American Destiny.” Luce seemed to

have mined the essay’s first two paragraphs. Lippmann had written, “[t]he

American spirit is troubled not by the dangers, and not by the difficulties of the

age, but by indecision.”447 Luce’s editorial began in a similar manner: “We

Americans are unhappy. We are not happy about ourselves in relation to America.

We are nervous – or gloomy – or apathetic.”448 To Lippmann this was merely part

of a sustained critique of American apathy that informed much of his early

writing. In his view this apathy stemmed from the nation’s “refusal to accept the

large responsibilities” that accompanied “the American Destiny,” the

“opportunity, the power and the responsibilities of a very great nation at the centre

of a civilised world.”449

The Luce–Lippmann thesis of historical inevitability had defenders. New York

Herald Tribune columnist Dorothy Thompson quoted from Lippmann extensively

and approvingly. She wrote, “[t]o Americanize enough of the world so that we

shall have a climate favorable to our growth is indeed a call to destiny.”450 Her

message could not have been more absolute in its Gibbonian invocation of the

stakes: “This will be an American century or it will be the beginning of the

decline and fall of the American Dream.”451

Luce’s article reached millions of Americans and provoked heated controversy.

Although U.S. Department of State memoranda cited the article positively,452

there was also vigorous criticism from various groups. Leading isolationist

senator Robert Taft argued that Americans could not impose their system on the

world. He correctly predicted that Luce’s globalism would require a huge

peacetime military establishment.453

447 Walter Lippmann, “The American Destiny,” Life, 5 June 1939, 47. 448 Luce, American Century, 3. 449 Lippmann, “American Destiny,” 73. 450 Dorothy Thompson, “The American Century,” New York Herald Tribune, 21 February 1941, reprinted in Luce, American Century, 50–51. 451 Ibid., 51. 452 Baughman, Henry R. Luce, 153. 453 Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (New York: Cybereditions, 2001), 109–12.

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In the nineteenth century Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the future might see

the rise of two rival great powers, Russia and the United States.454 Luce’s postwar

order did allow for other great powers. However, his ‘American Century’, like

Lippmann’s “America’s Destiny,” was based on the assumptions that Great

Britain’s days as the world’s police officer were over and that Great Britain would

not remain an equal partner to the United States.

Luce’s magazines gradually abandoned their wartime benevolence towards the

Soviets, and in 1943 Luce began to regard the Soviets as the chief impediment to

the American century. In a Life article of 4 September 1944 former U.S.

Ambassador to the Soviet Union William C. Bullitt predicted that Stalin, still

America’s ally, would soon replace Hitler, still to be vanquished, as the great

threat to Europe.455 Luce’s magazines still vacillated in their view of ‘legitimate’

Soviet actions, on several occasions likening Russia’s concern with its eastern

boundaries to U.S. hegemony over Latin America. The implication was that the

Soviet Union and United States were equal powers. “From the standpoint of lesser

nations, . . . the Big Two were dangerous not because their foreign policies were

so different, but because they were so much alike.”456

By 1946 Luce’s distrust of U.S.–Soviet cooperation had permanently hardened,

and he expressed frustration with the failure of the Truman administration and

larger newspapers to recognise the new rivalry. As 1946 progressed, Luce’s

magazines contradicted themselves less often; individual stories combined

summary and opinion more frequently and hardened their line towards the Soviet

Union. His anger resulted in a Life editorial that expressed his views:

It is time to face the truth. . . . [I]f we Americans want real peace, we will have to get used to the idea of living with this conflict. . . . We shall have to work hard and sleeplessly at the tough game of power politics and diplomacy.457

454 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: George Adlard, 1838), 414. He wrote “their starting point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.” 455 William C. Bullitt, “The World from Rome,” Life, 4 September 1944, 94–109. 456 “Nations: The Big Two.” Time, 5 November 1945. 457 Editorial, Life, 27 May 1946, 36.

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Walter Lippmann’s Cold War

Despite ever-present nationalist undercurrents, many Americans had assumed that

the end of the Second World War would provide a second chance to make the

world ‘safe for democracy’. Wendell Willkie’s One World (1943) pushed the

internationalism of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms.458

Unsophisticated as a political tract, the book espoused a vision of human unity

achieved through the common quest for freedom and justice realised through

Russo-American cooperation. That fact that a million copies were sold contrasts

with the fact that just after Willkie’s broadcasts accompanying publication

American distrust of Russia fell to its lowest point in public opinion polls.459

The Second World War had also had a profound effect on the celebrated journalist

Walter Lippmann;460 once a champion of Wilsonian views, he violently rejected

the Wilsonian inheritance. Lippmann’s U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the

Republic (1943) codified his new theories of international relations and was

followed in 1944 by U.S. War Aims.461 The works embodied a language of power

and of military preparedness, alliances, and tactics that countered Lippmann’s

earlier Wilsonian views.

Lippmann relentlessly condemned his generation’s push for disarmament and

collective security through the League of Nations. The central lesson of the

century of total war, he argued, was that those who wished to forestall conflict

could not do so by averting their attention from military problems. The aspiring

peacemaker, the statesman committed to amicable relations among nations, had

no option but to ready his country’s defence capabilities for seemingly inevitable

strife. The constituents of a proposed foreign policy were to be determined

according to a strict accounting of U.S. national interest. Of paramount 458 Wendell L. Willkie, One World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943). 459 Donald Wallace White, The American Century: The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, 1996), 91. 460 Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998), is the most comprehensive look at Lippmann, but does not really flesh out his ideas; for his international thought specifically see Anwar Hussain Syed, Walter Lippmann’s Philosophy of International Politics (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963) and Barton J. Bernstein, “Walter Lippmann and the Early Cold War,” in Cold War Critics: alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years, ed. Thomas G. Paterson (Chicago, Ill.: Quadrangle Books, 1971). 461 Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1943); Walter Lippmann, U.S. War Aims (London: H. Hamilton, 1944).

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importance was the establishment of alliances potent enough to deter all

aggressors in the postwar era and put into operation a settled balance of power

among nations. Specifically, the wartime partnership among the United States,

Great Britain, and the Soviet Union had to be cemented so that nothing could

challenge its power (i.e., any war against the partnership would be avoided as it

would be unwinnable). To Lippmann such a strategy was an essential corrective

to the American predilection for taking issues of defence too lightly and believing

“that our unearned security was the reward of our moral superiority.”462 The

nation had to shed the misguided habits of isolationism and reluctance to forge

alliances. Henceforth, the United States must vigilantly augment its security, a

valuable contribution to world peace: the “elementary means by which all foreign

policy must be conducted are the armed forces of the nation, the arrangement of

its strategic position, and the choice of its alliances.”463

Lippmann’s arguments implied that national interest was the most important

consideration, an absolute value to be vigorously defended according to the logic

of realpolitik. U.S Foreign Policy and U.S. War Aims were Lippmann’s most

nationalistic books. However, in light of his earlier work, notably An Inquiry into

the Principles of the Good Society,464 his main thrust must be seen as avowedly

anti-authoritarian rather than purely pro-American. Embedded within The Good

Society was the rationale for a fighting creed. Lippmann theorised that

totalitarianism was imbued with a primal militarism and that, as a result, the free

nations were destined to become embroiled in conflict with them. As

totalitarianism was synonymous with atavistic barbarism, Lippmann’s choice was

clear: civilised nations either took up arms against the menace or risked

annihilation. As he wrote in 1937:

We are living in a world in which great militarized nations are bent on conquest. The democracies are potentially stronger than the dictatorships, but they are softer, more self-indulgent, and more confused. They are unwilling to face the fact that in dealing with

462 Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy, 49. 463 Ibid., 47. 464 Walter Lippmann, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1937).

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governments that are willing to fight, there is no form of influence which really counts unless it is backed by a willingness to fight.465

Lippmann’s contention that fascism was unquenchably expansionist would prove

all too prescient, and his writings of the period invoke a historic mission for the

United States as the defender of Western Civilisation.466 In 1940 he proclaimed:

To our unready and unwilling hands . . . there has been confided the task of maintaining a seat of order and of freedom – of establishing a citadel so strong in its defences that by our own example the world can eventually be redeemed and pacified and made whole again. This is the American destiny.467

The same year he addressed a Harvard reunion, railing against the spread of

“organized mechanized evil” in the world: “We here in America may soon be the

last stronghold of our civilisation – the isolated and beleaguered citadel of law and

of liberty, of mercy and of charity, of justice among men and of love and of good

will.”468

Both U.S. Foreign Policy and U.S. War Aims were notable because in them

Lippmann railed against his generation’s involvement in Wilsonian collective

security and disarmament. To avert war could not be done by turning away from

military problems. He specifically called for the formation of a postwar grand

strategy: “Our failure now to form a national policy will, though we defeat our

enemies, leaves us dangerously exposed to deadly conflict at home and to

unmanageable perils from abroad.”469

The basic structure of this foreign policy was to be a measured assessment of

international objectives most vital to the country’s security and well-being. Of

paramount importance was the establishment of alliances strong enough to deter

aggressors and to put in place a settled balance of power. The wartime alliance

between the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union was to be cemented,

specifically as a corrective to the American for not taking seriously issues of

465 Walter Lippmann, “Is It War or Peace in Europe?” New York Herald Tribune, 16 October 1937. 466 Steel, Walter Lippmann, chapter 26, suggests that Lippmann’s international thought was vague at this point in his career. This would have made it even more appealing to those conducting ideological innovation. 467 Walter Lippmann, “America and the World,” Life, 3 June 1940, 103. 468 Quoted in Steel, Walter Lippmann, 383–384. 469 Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy, 5.

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security and believing “that our unearned security was the reward of our moral

superiority.”470

This was by no means intended as uncritical support for the democratic ideology

underpinning the United States. Having identified totalitarianism as the arch-

enemy of democracy, Lippmann conceptualised the Allies as the protectors of that

virtue. Lippmann nonetheless clarified: the postwar ‘policeman’ was not to be

regarded as a provider of “the good life. He should be confined to the limited task

of preserving an order within which the priest and teacher and constructor can

proceed.”471 His endorsement of alliance among the victors was not intended to

confer the task of governing the vanquished or ennobling civilisation. He

explicitly was not advocating awarding the United States carte blanche to impose

its own version of spiritual development worldwide. The superiority of victory

was not to be confused with the salvation of humankind.

For Lippmann, Wilsonianism had entailed a sense of superiority, doctrinaire

moralism, and disregard for the diversity of people and societies. Most crucially,

it did not recognise America as one nation among many potential allies, partners,

and adversaries. Wilson conceived of war as criminal, impinging on both rights

and privacy. Lippmann wrote of the Wilsonian ideal:

Therefore, all wars are wars to end wars, all wars are crusades which can be concluded only when all the peoples have submitted to the only true political religion. There will be peace only when all the peoples hold and observe the same self-evident principles.472

Although this was written after the period under review and cannot make up the

‘context’ of this chapter, this conception is compatible with Lippmann’s earlier

writing. The balance of power was effective not because all parties agreed to it in

the fashion of collective security but because none could challenge it. Lippmann’s

formulation of realpolitik was fused with his old critique of parochial American

democracy. As much as the balance of power was couched in terms of U.S.

military strength, it was also a de facto regulator of presumptive U.S.

470 Ibid., 49. 471 Walter Lippmann, “Lippman to Jacques Maritain” (1 July 1943), in Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann, ed. John Morton Blum (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985), 440–41. 472 Walter Lippmann, Isolation and Alliances: An American Speaks to the British (Boston, Mass.: Little Brown, 1952), 26.

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omnipotence. Thus, after the war Lippmann supported accommodation and

coexistence with the Soviet Union and hoped that the United States would

conceive of the U.S.S.R. as another great power with legitimate needs, objectives,

anxieties, and spheres of interest.

In his 1947 compilation of newspaper articles entitled The Cold War and released

after the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, Lippmann attacked Kennan’s ‘X

article’ and the theory of containment with which he conflated it.473 Lippmann’s

understanding of Kennan appears to be incorrect and in fact his critique was a

coruscating attack on the nascent Truman Doctrine. At the practical level, it

showed why containment was too costly and too unmanageable in terms of

choosing reliable allies. Ultimately, containment would divert attention from

America’s defence needs within the Atlantic alliance.

The Cold War also reflected Lippmann’s broader philosophy of politics;

containment was a “strategic monstrosity”474 because it suggested U.S.

willingness to campaign for ideological hegemony. Crusades would be launched,

predicated on the immature assumption that the American worldview was

incontestably correct and more morally coherent than those of the Soviets or other

rivals. Lippmann counselled that the United States should forswear ideological

mortal combat and confront the Soviet Union and any other world power on the

basis of global political realities and intelligible policy goals. Lippmann saw his

critique of U.S. foreign policy as intimately linked to America’s sense of self; the

lesson of Wilson was not that international commitments should be avoided but

that they should be animated by the same dispositions and values that nurtured the

nation’s isolationism and parochialism.

According to Lippmann, substituting a newly interventionist and expansionist

foreign policy would simply exacerbate the self-absorption of the United States as

it revelled in its now-worldwide superiority. The American fundamentalist

mentality for which he reprimanded Wilson must be avoided.475 Lippmann was

concerned not only that the United States be protected from the world but also

473 Lippmann, Cold War. 474 Ibid., 18. 475 Ibid., 22.

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that the world be protected from the United States and that the United States be

protected from itself.

Lippmann’s realism rested on a definition of the national interest that was elastic

and could therefore accommodate widely divergent, at times contradictory,

proposals. The elasticity allowed Lippmann to formulate policies that other

realists, such as Kennan, could never share. Both were dedicated to pursuing the

national interest and distrusted moralism and crusades for democracy, although

more of this crept into their analyses than either of them probably would have

cared to admit. Lippmann’s 1947 critique of the “X article” and Truman Doctrine

showed the deep gap that had grown between him and the U.S. State Department:

The history of diplomacy is the history of relations among rival powers, which did not enjoy political intimacy, and did not respond to appeals to common purposes. Nevertheless there have been settlements. . . . For a diplomat to think that rival and unfriendly powers cannot be brought to a settlement is to forget what diplomacy is all about.476

Ultimately, it was the language of Lippmann’s earlier wartime writing which was

to be given unbounded scope in the Truman Doctrine. The title of his volume The

Cold War, although not the first use of the term, seems to have been its point of

entry into the popular American lexicon.477 The point of examining both Luce and

Lippmann is that their views were ideologically ‘conventional’ in the sense of

being commonplace. They consisted of a mix of ill-defined cosmopolitan thought,

a recognition of great power ambitions in a ‘spheres of influence’ arrangement,

and a sense that whilst American values (principally ‘freedom’ in Luce’s case)

had triumphed over fascism they should not be the sole determinant of the

postwar order.

Step two of contextual analysis: what was the author doing in producing a

text in relation to available and problematic political action, which makes up

the practical context?

Both Luce and Lippmann were addressing and perhaps echoing the opinions of

the newly emergent group of national security bureaucrats. The Second World

476 Lippmann, Cold War, 30. 477 Anders Stephanson, “Fourteen Notes on the Very Concept of the Cold War,” in Rethinking Geopolitics, ed. Simon Dalby and Gearóid Ó Tuathail (London: Routledge, 1998), 63.

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War had ushered in a profound bureaucratic revolution in the United States. The

federal bureaucracy changed in two important ways. First, government agencies

came to control the creation and disbursement of a significant share of the

national wealth. Second, the balance of power within the federal bureaucracy

decisively shifted to those agencies that concerned themselves with foreign and

military affairs.478 In 1939 the federal government had about 800,000 civilian

employees, about 10 per cent of whom worked for national security agencies; by

the end of the Second World War that figure approached 4 million, of whom 75

per cent were engaged in national security activities.479 The last pre-mobilisation

defence budget represented 1.4 per cent of the gross national product; the lowest

postwar defence budget, for about eighteen months between demobilisation and

Cold War remobilisation, represented 4.7 per cent of the GNP. Once postwar

remobilisation was under way, defence spending rarely dipped below 8 per cent of

the GNP.480

One of the greatest consequences of this was the coming to power of a national

security elite remarkable for its homogeneity. Nothing like it had previously

existed in the United States, and there were no equivalents in other branches of

government. Although the Founding Fathers had been a governing class and had

thought of themselves as such, they had shown far deeper ideological cleavages

than existed among members of this national security managerial class. “Never

before had a self-defining, self-selecting and self-perpetuating group held power

for so long in American politics.”481 Between 1940 and 1967 “all first- and

second-level posts in the national security bureaucracy were held by fewer than

four hundred individuals who rotated through a series of key postings.”482 In

short, as early as 1940 the national security managers represented a small,

durable, and exclusive club.

“Most shared the experience of having battled against parochialism and

isolationism at home. Most – though not all – had been Atlantic Firsters.”483 In his

478 Hogan, A Cross of Iron; Leffler, Preponderance of Power. 479 Richard J. Barnet, Roots of War (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 24. 480 Ibid., 24–5. 481 Ibid., 48. 482 Ibid. 483 H. G. Nicholas, The United States and Britain (Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 120–21.

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refinement of this establishment’s homogeneity, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. identified

this group’s civil societal outlets and, crucially, their bipartisan dominance. The

group

furnished a steady supply of always orthodox and often able people to Democratic as well as Republican administrations. . . . The community was the heart of the American Establishment. Its household deities were Henry L. Stimson and Elihu Root, . . . its front organizations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations, its organs the New York Times and Foreign Affairs. Its politics were predominantly Republican; but it possessed what its admirers saw as a commitment to public service and its critics as an appetite for power which impelled its members to serve Presidents of whatever political faith.484

This chapter is not intended to recapitulate the period’s numerous bureaucratic

and diplomatic studies or biographical studies of this group’s individual members.

Reconstructing the careers of key figures is not the same as reconstructing the

history of foreign policy. Instead, the purpose of identifying this group is to reveal

the importance of this small epistemic community485 that dominated the

machinery of government by 1946.

However, it is important to avoid the suggestion of consensus even within such a

restricted group of policymakers. Sixty years after the emergence of the Cold

War, it is easy to fall into post hoc rationalisation and draw a line of continuity

between the Second World War U.S. military machine and the postwar national

security state. There was no return to peacetime levels of relative military

inactivity. The policy of containment and the emergence of NSC-68 were not

inevitable. Indeed, “state making unfolded in a political context that had

ideological, cultural and party dimensions.”486 It was to precisely this group that

innovative ideological change had to be addressed in order for it to be inculcated

into the bureaucracy of the national security state.

484 Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 128. 485 See also Parmar, “‘Mobilizing America’”; Parmar, “Anglo-American Elites”. 486 Hogan, Cross of Iron, 5.

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Step three of contextual analysis: the identification of ‘containment’ as an

ideological move

The continuing influence of Wilson’s rhetoric of freedom was important to the

policy of containment. With America’s assumption of a global role in the First

World War, Wilson recast U.S. political culture for a global stage. Wilsonians

attempted to use the U.S. normative model to solve a multitude of global ‘wrongs’

and reconstruct the world order. Wilson recast U.S. norms as universal norms,

casting aside all who opposed those norms. The most obvious rhetorical example

was Wilson’s condemnation of German submarine warfare as “warfare against

mankind. It is a war against all nations.”487

Wilson paved the way for total war and corresponding annihilation of the

‘enemy’. Thus, he “[f]used, firmly in the American tradition, this secular concept

of reasonable conduct with a thoroughly Protestant notion of election and mission

into a full-fledged ideology of U.S. exceptionalism.”488

The normative shift was immense. It was evident throughout the Second World

War in Roosevelt’s view that “normal practices of diplomacy . . . are of no

possible use in dealing with international outlaws.”489

The implication was twofold: first, the only solution to such an enemy was total

annihilation; and, second, Henry Stimson’s appropriation of Abraham Lincoln’s

assertion that no nation could survive half slave and half free.490 In these terms the

Atlantic Charter and Four Freedoms represented a new formulation of U.S.

ideology and offered a fundamentally new conception of the international system;

freedom was no longer constrained by simple negative definition. Such logic was

inherent in Roosevelt’s rhetorical expression:

Any peace with lawless aggressors, then, was a mere pax falsa, merely “another armistice.” Having formulated a maximalist notion of

487 Woodrow Wilson, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War Against Germany” (2 April 1917), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65366&st=&st1=#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 03/08/11]. 488 Stephanson, “Fourteen Notes,” 77. 489 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Orders the U.S. Navy to ‘Shoot on Sight’,”1941, quoted in ibid, 78. 490 Quoted in Andrew Preston, The War Council: Mcgeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 19.

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“peace” and simultaneously divested all non-western space of the traditional distinction between war and peace, Roosevelt had really declared that the United States was always already in a state of quasi-war and would so remain until, negatively, the last dictator had been eliminated and, positively, the Four Freedoms had been everywhere secured.491

Such language featured prominently in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) wartime

rhetoric. Returning from Yalta in 1945, FDR spoke of “the assurance that neither

the Nazis nor Prussian militarism could again be revived to threaten the peace and

the civilisation of the world.”492 Nonetheless, the Second World War did see

genuine tripartite cooperation between the members of the Grand Alliance as well

as convincing attempts to find a mutually acceptable form of postwar order.

Roosevelt’s rhetorical reshaping of the political debate was clearly somewhat

malleable, at least with respect to a flexible interpretation of who the ‘last

dictator’ might be.

Such rhetorical commonplaces, which included the term ‘civilisation’, had been

used to legitimise wartime cooperation with the Soviets. As Patrick Jackson

states, “Its replacement by the more restrictive ‘Western Civilisation’ was an

important part of the postwar world,”493 intended to literally write the Soviet

Union out of the ‘civilised’ world. Truman mobilised the concept of

totalitarianism

as a way of making sense of what was read as Soviet intransigence and impositions: crude power moves, subversion and conspiracy . . . ‘Totalitarianism’ thus served to collapse the differences between fascism and communism.494

The rhetorical use and refashioning of Wilsonian discourse paved the way for a

whole range of new political norms, as well as policy legitimation, that would

eventually find expression in the Truman Doctrine. Wilsonianism provided a

language that could be refashioned to allow for global crusade and make the

prospect of diplomatic engagement untenable.

Some dissenters continued to argue for a much more focused conception of the

national interest. The ultimate misuse of their alternative visions of grand strategy 491 Stephanson, “Fourteen Notes,” 79. 492 Roosevelt, “Address to Congress on the Yalta Conference”. 493 Jackson, Civilizing the Enemy, 59. 494 Stephanson, “Cold War Considered,” 58.

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indicates the degree to which containment was an ideological move. George

Kennan,495 whose analysis of Soviet intentions would provide the most pervasive

intellectual grounding for the Truman Doctrine, criticised the final idea of

containment that Truman implemented. Those of Kennan’s writings that predate

the Truman Doctrine and NSC-68 presented an alternative conception of U.S.

grand strategy, a vision of containment much more in line with what would now

be called a realist school of thought. The fact that Kennan’s strongly realist views

existed within the contested arena of the national interest debate shows the

remarkable variance in meanings used to articulate and define the national interest

in the late 1940s.

Nonetheless, the Truman Doctrine would reconfigure the ideas that Kennan

expressed in his “Long Telegram” and NSC-68 would draw upon the “X article.”

Henry Kissinger’s assertion that “George Kennan came as close to authoring the

diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history”496 constitutes a

misinterpretation of Kennan’s position that Kennan took pains to correct.

Kennan’s writing would enter the mainstream of early Cold War grand strategy,

but his locutionary force, his illocutionary intention, and the perlocutionary

consequences would diverge.

In February 1946, while he was Chargé d’Affaires in Moscow, Kennan sent the

8,000-word “Long Telegram” to the U.S. State Department. As previously

mentioned, his article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” appeared under the

pseudonym ‘X’ in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs.497 A gifted scholar with

a subtle mind, Kennan was one of the Department’s most experienced Soviet

495 Kennan has been the subject of considerable scholarship. This thesis was in part inspired by Stephanson’s Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, which takes a post-structuralist inspired approach to Kennan. This chapter has also made use of the following: John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2011); Gellman, Contending with Kennan; Robert L. Ivie, “Realism Masking Fear; George F. Kennan’s Political Rhetoric,” in Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations, ed. Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1996); Kuklick, Blind Oracles; Lukacs, George Kennan; David Allan Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of Us Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Miscamble, “Kennan through His Texts”; Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Wilson D. Miscamble, “Rejected Architect and Master Builder: George Kennan, Dean Acheson and Postwar Europe,” The Review of Politics, 58, no. 3 (1996): 437–68. 496 Henry Kissinger and Clare Boothe Luce. White House Years (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1979), 135. 497 ‘X’, “Sources of Soviet Conduct.”

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specialists. The idea of containment was not new when the “X article” introduced

the term containment to the world. Kennan’s achievement lay in his giving

intelligent expression to a U.S. view of the Soviet Union that was already

unfolding.

Kennan’s primary thesis in the “Long Telegram” was that U.S. policy toward the

Soviets during and after the Second World War had been based on the incorrect

assumption that there were no structural impediments to normal relations. Kennan

asserted that Soviet foreign policy had little relationship to Western action and

that the Soviet “party line is not based on any objective analysis of [the] situation

beyond Russia’s borders. . . . [I]t arises mainly from basic inner-Russian

necessities.”498 According to Kennan’s line of reasoning, the United States could

not resume normal diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R. because the U.S.S.R.

relied on the fiction of external threat to maintain its internal legitimacy. Kennan

wrote,

At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity . . . And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.499

Kennan’s analysis revealed his realist assessment that the Kremlin would seek

ongoing Soviet expansion, taking advantage of all opportunities and exploiting

every weakness and vulnerability in the West. As might be expected of this type

of reasoning, he suggested that although Soviet leaders were impervious to

reason, they were responsive to force.

Kennan said little about U.S. objectives, tactics, and capabilities. His analysis of

Soviet policy clearly conveyed the message that Stalinist Russia was a totalitarian

regime bent on expansion. Kennan’s telegram prescribed little and said little about

U.S. interests other than the need to contain Soviet power.

His “Long Telegram” and other dispatches were immediately disseminated in

Washington. Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal was so impressed with

Kennan’s analysis that he distributed copies within the administration and press. It

served a more blunt but ideologically significant purpose, too: “For Forrestal, 498 Kennan, “The Long Telegram,” 5. 499 Ibid., 5–6.

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Kennan’s message forever engraved the Nazi totalitarian image onto Soviet

foreign policy.”500 Less than six months later, still before the Truman Doctrine

was announced, the Clifford-Elsey report,501 commissioned by President Truman,

effectively repeated much of the analysis of the “Long Telegram” but also started

a process of toughening the American stance towards the Soviets.

Kennan’s analysis did not provide a strategy, being devoted merely to defining the

Soviet threat. However, from his recognisably realist starting point, it followed

that the national interest would be best served by trying to restructure the

international order not through a ‘universalistic’ grand strategy but through a

particularist approach geared toward balance among the great powers. Security

could be maintained by balancing power, interests, and antagonisms. For Kennan,

perhaps this argument’s most important corollary was that not all parts of the

world were equally vital to U.S. security. Kennan purposefully oversimplified his

list to “only five centers of industrial and military power in the world, which are

important to us from the standpoint of national security.”502 These centres were

Great Britain, Germany, central Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Only one of

these centres (the U.S.S.R.) was in hostile hands. America’s primary interest was

to see that no others fell under such control. Kennan recognised the need for a

U.S. sphere of influence in the western hemisphere. He was saying that industrial–

military power was the most dangerous; therefore, keeping it under control was

the highest priority. Priorities of interest had to be established because capabilities

were limited.503

Kennan’s view of international order was not devoid of optimism. Rivalries

within the system could result in equilibrium. Because capabilities are finite,

interests must also be limited; vital interests must be distinguished from non-

essential ones. The means must be subordinated to the ends, but indiscriminate

methods could corrupt the ends. As Gaddis admits, Kennan the realist still

500 Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 109. 501 Clark Clifford, “American Relations with the Soviet Union [‘Clifford-Elsey Report’]” (24 September 1946), http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/sectioned.php?documentid=4–1&pagenumber=1&groupid=1 [accessed 03/08/11]. 502 George F. Kennan, “Lecture at the Naval War College, ‘U.S. Foreign Policy’” (11 October 1948), quoted in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 29. 503 Ibid., 27–30.

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“insisted on using this perception of interests as a standard against which to

evaluate threats, not the other way around; threats had no meaning, Kennan

insisted, except with reference to and in terms of one’s concepts of interests.”504

Kennan’s policymaking contemporaries, who read the “Long Telegram” and “X

article,” did not appear to fully grasp his worldview. His logic was too subtle and

at times too muddled to be clear. However, Secretary of State James Byrnes’

initial interpretation of Kennan’s stance was “patience and firmness” and for

much of 1946 that stance became the guiding principal for policy with regard to

U.S.–Soviet relations.505

In Kennan’s later writings the force of his meaning of containment came through

more plainly, but clearly these were not texts that were available to Kennan’s

audience in the 1940s. Essentially, he had rejected universalism on the grounds

“that men everywhere are . . . animated by substantially the same hopes and

inspirations, that they all react substantially the same in given circumstances”;

therefore, “to make national security contingent upon the worldwide diffusion of

American institutions would be to exceed national capabilities, thereby

endangering those institutions.”506

Benefiting from Kennan’s subsequent writings, later historians have been able to

impose order on his worldview. In 1946–7 Kennan’s thinking appeared confused.

He accused the Soviets of being ideologically bound to expansion yet dismissed

Marxism as a “fig leaf.”507 In the “Long Telegram” he discussed the Soviet

Union’s “real” nature and intentions in terms of an absolute ideal truth, arguing

that Soviet Communism’s vital principle was the destruction of all competing

power, but he said nothing about immediate prospects.508 Whatever nuances

Kennan had privately intended as America’s appropriate policy response to the

Soviets, the subtlety of his analysis was overshadowed by his devastating critique

504 Ibid., 31. 505 Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 111; Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman, 290. 506 George F. Kennan, “What is Policy” (18 December 1947), reproduced in George F. Kennan, Measures Short of War: The George F. Kennan Lectures at the National War College, 1946–47, ed. Giles D. Harlow and George C. Maerz (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1991), 298. 507 Kennan, “The Long Telegram,” 6. 508 Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, 76–8.

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of Soviet ideology and ambition and his view that the U.S. strategic goal must be

changing that system of government.

It is not hard to see why Kennan had been interpreted in this way. He called on the

administration to create the necessary will for victory, expressing his fear that

Americans lacked the discipline needed to deal with the Soviet threat. The

implication was that the federal government must inform Americans of Cold War

realities and reform the national character. “I cannot over-emphasise the

importance of this,” he stressed.509 Although a realist, Kennan argued that success

depended on the “health and vigor” of our own society because Communism, like

a “malignant parasite,” fed only on the “diseased tissue”510 of degenerate

societies. He continued:

Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow. . . . If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in the face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit.511

Kennan was making an impassioned realist plea which ended with a conservative

critique of America, as much as its main thrust had been Soviet Marxism.

However, the subtlety of his analysis and his generalised pronouncement about

the problems America faced in reacting to them were overlooked. For readers of

the “long telegram,” reading without the context provided by the “X article” and

Kennan’s later writing, it would have been easy (as Lippmann’s own misreading

of Kennan suggests) to simply take away his strong rhetoric, combined with

Manichean binaries.

Truman would answer Kennan’s call to counter an enemy Kennan had defined in

such inflexible and expansive terms. Although Truman’s solution would not enact

the limited vision of containment that Kennan had anticipated or would later

claim he desired, the Truman Doctrine and NSC-68 would reflect Kennan’s

conception of the Soviet threat.

509 Kennan, “The Long Telegram,” 18. 510 Ibid. (all three short quotes). 511 Ibid; emphasis added.

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Step four of contextual analysis: the Truman Doctrine

Focusing on the Truman Doctrine, this section will address the question ‘What

relation between political ideology and political action best explains the diffusion

of certain ideologies, and what effect does this have on political behaviour?’

In less than twenty minutes Truman’s address to a joint session of Congress on 12

March 1947 established the Cold War not as a military clash or even a struggle for

economic supremacy but as a contest of values. Truman clearly stated his guiding

principle: “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free

people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside

pressures.”512

Soviet ruthlessness and the Soviet drive for expansion – as characterised by

Kennan – began to infuse Truman’s rhetoric, lurking behind his warnings of

coercion and political infiltration. Soviet ideology was to be countered by U.S.

ideology, which was less systematic but dedicated to the defence of freedom and

democracy. Truman’s speech presented a Manichean contrast between American

life and values, which served as a beacon to the world, and their Soviet

counterparts, which represented a perverted system that impoverished and

enslaved its citizens.

The speech signified a transformation in U.S. foreign policy and was in a sense

the endpoint of a gradual narrowing of the administration’s perceptions and

options. Truman’s speech built on the ‘Iron Curtain’ rhetoric513 that Winston

Churchill had used in his infamous Fulton speech the year before and placed

Churchill’s ideological commitments and Kennan’s vision of an expansive,

intractable enemy (transmitted in simplified form via the Clifford-Elsey report)

within the context of U.S. policy, lifting it to the status of doctrine.514

512 Harry S. Truman, “Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine” (12 March 1947), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=12846&st=&st1=#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 03/08/11]. 513 Winston Churchill, “Sinews of Peace, Speech at Westminster College, Missouri” (5 March 1946), http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/1946/s460305a_e.htm [accessed 03/08/11]. 514 On the Truman Doctrine this chapter has principally referred to the following studies except where indicated: Denise M. Bostdorff, Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine: The Cold War Call to Arms (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2008); Lynn Boyd Hinds and Theodore Otto Windt, The Cold War as Rhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945–1950 (London: Praeger

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Great Britain’s decision to discontinue military and financial aid to Greece and

Turkey triggered the Truman Doctrine. Truman presented Congress with a stark

choice: either let Greece and Turkey, both vital to Mediterranean security, face

internal and external pressures on their own, or go to their aid.

The Truman Doctrine was an attempt to convince Congress, the press, and the

American people that the decision to intervene in Greece and Turkey was

justified. On first reading, Truman’s speech appears unproblematic, a relatively

orthodox contribution to a familiar discourse on America’s role in the world,

advocating increased involvement in international affairs (in this case, economic

support for two collapsing governments). Luce’s American Century and

Lippmann’s ‘American Destiny’ seemed to have been finally realised. Truman

was no longer plagued by the indecision and apathy about America’s manifest

role that Luce and Lippmann had railed against in their political editorials directed

at Truman and their general analyses of the U.S. condition.

However, the speech represented a more fundamental realignment of American

ideological thought on grand strategy. Truman’s opening lines painted the

situation in global terms, and also signalled that he was about to announce an

unprecedented move away from America’s preceding foreign-policy stance, a

move that required the attention of Congress and the policy elite. Truman linked

the international crisis to U.S. foreign policy, which he linked, in turn, to national

security. Within the space of two lines he expanded U.S. grand strategy to global

proportions.

Lippmann, Luce, and Kennan had called for a foreign policy rooted in U.S.

national interest rather than fundamentalist idealism. Lippmann and Luce had

emphasised America’s global responsibility and Luce had written on the theme of

the indivisibility of the postwar world. Truman had reinterpreted their bounded

concept of American internationalism. Truman’s emphasis on national security

was also a significant innovation. It allowed him to articulate a grand strategy that

ostensibly was based on traditional balance-of-power thinking but that actually

projected global civilisational values. Publishers, 1991); Hogan, A Cross of Iron; Leffler, Preponderance of Power; Martin J. Medhurst, Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1997).

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Before the Second World War the term national security had rarely been used. It

had started to feature in foreign-policy discourse only in the late 1940s. Earlier

traditions had linked national interest to the rise of the nation state. It is well

documented that the term interests of states had later been imported from Europe

to America.515 The term national interest had remained a dominant construct in

discussions of foreign policy, and by the 1920s it had acquired strongly negative

connotations.516 Nonetheless, the concept had informed the writings of Luce,

Lippmann, and Kennan.

The phrase “national security”517 suggested: “a level of security midway between

an individual’s ‘social security’ and the world’s ‘collective security’. Dovetailing

with the emergence of the United States as a superpower, the term placed

responsibility for security on the military preparedness of the nation-state.”518 In a

1938 article advocating a proactive national policy that would prevent rather than

merely respond to trouble, Edward Mead Earle of Princeton’s Institute for

Advanced Study used the term national security as, effectively, a synonym for

national preparedness.519

‘National security’ provided common political ground on which internationalists

of both the realist national-interest school and the collective-security school could

press for the one basic goal on which they agreed, the necessity of U.S.

involvement in the postwar world. The emergence of ‘national security’ is

important because the concept reflects a concern with configuring an external

environment compatible with U.S. domestic visions of a good society.

The Truman Doctrine was about more than American geographic expansion or

even the material protection of allied territory. Truman, Acheson, and their

advisors repeatedly emphasised that the Soviet Union did not have to attack the

United States to undermine its security. Soviet or Communist expansion into the

515 Felix Gilbert and American Council of Learned Societies, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970). 516 Charles Austin Beard, George H. E. Smith, Alfred Vagts, and William Beard, The Idea of National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy (Chicago, Ill.: Quadrangle Books, 1966). 517 Truman, “The Truman Doctrine.” 518 Rosenberg, “Commentary,” 3. 519 Edward M. Earle, “American Military Policy and National Security,” Political Science Quarterly, 53 (1938), 1–13; also see Edward M. Earle, “National Security and Foreign Policy,” Yale Review, 29 (1940): 444–60.

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Eurasian land mass, and accompanying domination of its resources, would force

the United States to alter its political and economic system. In Truman’s words,

such expansion would require:

a stringent and comprehensive system of allocation and rationing in order to husband our smaller resources. It would require us to become a garrison state, and to impose upon ourselves a system of centralised regimentation unlike anything we have ever known.520

Truman’s announcement of his doctrine also evoked Wilson’s universalist

rhetoric (‘making the world safe for democracy’) and the war rhetoric that FDR

had used to rally Americans against fascism. Such rhetoric had appeared in the

Atlantic Charter, the Yalta agreement, and various Truman speeches, but was now

used to justify America’s global reach.521 The speech’s major theme was the

contrast between the “free world” and “totalitarianism,” described as “alternative

ways of life”;522 the suggestion was no longer in line with Lippmann’s postwar

cosmopolitanism.

From the speech’s outset, Truman clearly indicated that Greece and Turkey were

inextricably part of U.S. national security but also symbolised a more fundamental

problem. He reminded his audience of the Second World War’s ‘real’ meaning:

the United States had fought that war to keep nations from imposing their way of

life on others. Thus, an analogy linked the Second World War and the Cold War.

Truman stated:

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.

The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. . . . I believe it must be the policy

520 Harry S. Truman, “Special Message to the Congress on the Mutual Security Program” (6 March 1952), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=14424&st=&st1=#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 03/08/11]. 521 Hinds and Windt, The Cold War as Rhetoric, 140–41. 522 Truman, “The Truman Doctrine.”

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of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

I believe that we must assist free people to work out their own destinies in their own way.523

Truman had specified the ideological lens through which every American could

see the central meaning of complex and difficult problems confronting the country

in international affairs. He divided the world into a Manichean duality with no

possible synthesis, minimising or ignoring differences within the so-called free

world and within the Communist world, and he accentuated the moral and mortal

conflict between the two worlds.

Tocqueville, an early observer of U.S. exceptionalism, had said of such language:

Democratic writers are perpetually coining abstract words . . . in which they sublimate into further abstractions the abstract terms of the language. Moreover to render their mode of speech more succinct, they personify the object of these abstract terms and make it act like a real person.524

The personifications would come later, in NSC-68. For the moment, Truman stuck

with abstract definition of the enemy, carefully avoiding direct reference to the

Soviet Union.

Within his eighteen-minute speech, Truman used the word free or one of its

synonyms twenty-four times, totalitarian four times, democracy three times, and

Communist only once. With respect to his distinction between political good and

evil, his language transcended the actual conditions in Greece and Turkey and

exaggerated their significance. In reality, events had not been as drastic as the

speech suggested. The U.S. State Department had even worded the Greek

government’s request for assistance.

Truman faced a political and rhetorical problem in that neither Greece nor Turkey

was a democracy. Therefore, in the sections of his speech that dealt with either

country he used the word free loosely, to mean independent. The illocutionary

force paved the way for alliances with nations that made no pretence to being

‘free’.

523 Truman, “The Truman Doctrine.” 524 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. J. P. Mayer (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1969), 73.

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It was also difficult to define the nature of the threat to Greece and Turkey.

Neither the Soviet army nor Communist troops from any other country had

invaded Greece or Turkey. Therefore, Truman defined the threat to both countries

using the abstract terms militant minority, armed minority, and outside pressures.

Truman defined strategic policy in universalist terms yet justified it in ideological

terms.

The speech did not have unanimous approval within the administration. Kennan

objected to its ideological thrust and universal commitment. He particularly

objected to the phrase ‘alternative ways of life’. He even wrote an alternative

speech, which was rejected.525 However, the nature of the criticism of the speech

attests to its success as a political, illocutionary act that created and legitimised a

new strategic idea based on a revised ideological view of the world.

The notion of a smooth transition from the end of the Second World War through

Kennan’s writings to the Truman Doctrine is untenable. By examining

contemporary political thought, we can suggest that the Truman Doctrine

represented significant ideological innovation. From an ideological perspective

the speech successfully became the basis for conventional policy wisdom (and

would be extended in NSC68).

Step five of contextual analysis: NSC-68

As the final step in this chapter’s contextual analysis, this section will address the

forms of political thought and action that are involved in disseminating and

conventionalising ideological change. The analysis will focus on NSC-68.

NSC-68 was the blueprint for military purpose and strategy in which the

expression of containment became pronounced. Published in spring 1950, the

document was the culmination of the first formative period of domestic political

and policy debate about the nature of the U.S. approach to the Cold War. NSC-68

recapitulated many arguments outlined in earlier NSC documents but gave them

greater urgency and integrated them more fully into a national security ideology.

However, in domestic terms NSC-68 and the primacy it would gain during the

525 George F. Kennan and Alfred Dupont Chandler, Memoirs 1925–1950 (Boston, Mass.: Little Brown, 1967), 313–24.

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1950s marked Truman’s failure to reconcile his post-1945 ambitions to create a

domestic state on “something like a peacetime basis while also safeguarding its

security”526 with America’s forging ahead as the foremost world power. Leffler

notes: “When faced with a gap between goals and capabilities, the thrust of the

Truman administration’s policy was almost always to expand capabilities . . .

rather than to narrow goals.”527

NSC-68 epitomised such a trend. Kennan had failed to articulate a clear strategy in

either the “Long Telegram” or the “X article” and then had lost his public

argument with Lippmann and private argument with Paul Nitze about the shape

and scope of Cold War strategy. These failures allowed the Truman

administration to pursue a primarily military-orientated policy that far exceeded

the political and economic basis of containment.

At first glance it is not easy to see the difference between Kennan’s conception of

U.S. interests and the conception espoused in NSC-68, which proclaimed “the

integrity and vitality of our free society which is founded on the dignity and worth

of the individual.”528 Somewhat confusingly, given its stance on Leninism’s

seemingly unstoppable expansionism, NSC-68 stated that a “free society relies

primarily on the strength and appeal of its idea, and it feels no compulsion sooner

or later to bring all societies into conformity with it.”529 NSC-68 appeared to rely

on the balance of power to ensure that diversity. But that marked the end of any

similarity to Kennan’s views. Kennan “had argued that all that was necessary to

maintain the balance of power . . . was to keep centers of industrial–military

capability out of hostile hands.”530 NSC-68 went much further: “What is new,

what makes the continuing crisis, is the polarization of power which now

inseparably confronts the slave society with the free. . . . [A] defeat of free

institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.”531

NSC-68’s new vision was of Wilsonian total negation of the enemy: “[T]he

dynamic notion that freedom is always under threat, internally as well as 526 Hogan, Cross of Iron, 312. 527 Melvyn Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–48: Reply,” American Historical Review, 89, no. 2 (1984): 393. 528 NSC-68, 9. 529 Ibid., 11. 530 Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 89. 531 NSC-68, 12.

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externally. . . . [T]he very threat of arbitrary imposition on the still independent

self is a form of slavery.”532 The notion that freedom was indivisible found

prominent expression in NSC-68, as did the corollary that Americans had no

choice but to rethink the way they saw themselves and accept an identity as

champions of freedom everywhere. NSC-68 indicated that the United States must

be far more actively engaged with the world: “It is only by practical affirmation,

abroad as well as at home, of our essential values, that we can preserve our own

integrity.”533 NSC-68 very effectively drew the boundaries of America’s political

identity in a way that tied the survival of democracy at home to its defence

abroad. Americans would have to be willing to fight to defend their way of life

but would also forge global conditions under which the U.S. democratic system

could prosper.

NSC-68 continued themes presented by FDR: “implacable enemy, infiltration and

subversion, civilizational negation, worldwide struggle and infinite strategic

needs.”534 In one sense NSC-68 did not say anything that other national security

documents had not already expressed. However, it did add a sense of urgency,

reduced whatever ambiguity existed in the aftermath of the Truman Doctrine, and

firmly tied the concept of national security to a global vision of containment.

It was a newly conceived world of total war. The distinction between war and

peace, which had vacillated in the 1930s, had given way to “permanent

struggle.”535 NSC-68 implied that Americans would have to redefine their identity

and reject isolationism. The document concretely spelled out the meaning of “our

way of life.”536 Whereas the Truman Doctrine had merely suggested the

ideological stakes, NSC-68 explicitly defined them. The rhetoric of NSC-68

marginalised domestic debate by nearly equating dissent with disloyalty and by

implying that domestic debate threatened the security of the United States and the

free world, of which the United States was the defender.

532 Anders Stephanson, “The Cold War as American Ideology,” in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, ed. Odd Arne Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 85. 533 NSC-68, 13. 534 Stephanson, “Fourteen Notes,” 17. 535 Ibid. 536 NSC-68, 7.

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Emily Rosenberg has stressed the rhetorical power of binary opposites. Through a

series of dichotomies, NSC-68 extended the Truman Doctrine into an overarching

metanarrative of idealised U.S. identity versus Soviet society.537 The primary

metanarrative at work is the contrast between slave and free man, which had been

a guiding vision of the republic since its inception and which Wilson had

appropriated.

NSC-68 asserted that active internationalism, rather than isolationism,

safeguarded American liberties against the persistent danger of the garrison state.

Quoting from the Constitution, the document suggested historical continuity: its

“fundamental purpose” was to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and

our Posterity.”538

NSC-68 managed to “wrap departures from tradition, in tradition itself.”539 The

strategy extended U.S. exceptionalist political discourse, including Truman’s

wartime rhetoric. The notion of Manifest Destiny was apparent, but now

unfettered by the traditional limits of discursive interpretation: “Even if there were

no Soviet Union . . . we would face the great problem of the free society,

accentuated many-fold in this industrial age, of reconciling order, security, the

need for participation, with the requirement of freedom.”540

NSC-68 also served to delineate the ‘enemy’ and, in the absence of a current

material threat, reconfigure the world as an ideological balance of power. The

document stated that the U.S.S.R. had no plans for immediate war with the United

States but was directed toward military growth and already had the ability to

overrun Eurasia.

In the absence of an immediate military threat, the question was not whether the

United States should prepare for war but how it could prepare to prevent war

while fighting an offensive Cold War. John Young and John Kent note that “NSC-

68 and its rearmament strategy, like NATO, were initially designed more to create

537 Emily S. Rosenberg, “NSC-68 and Cold War Culture,” in American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC-68, ed. Ernest R. May (Boston, Mass.: Bedford Books, 1993), 160–64. 538 NSC-68, 9. 539 Hogan, Cross of Iron, 298. 540 NSC-68, 38.

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the conditions for a strong foreign policy geared to fighting the Cold War and

strengthening allies, than to providing the resources for a military victory.”541

In formulating NSC-68, the national security elite responded to the public

commentary conducted by commentators such as Luce and Lippmann and the

private analysis of George Kennan, but all of them had envisaged a very different

American century.

Conclusion

This chapter provided a contextual analysis of the Truman Doctrine and NSC-68.

Both documents drew on existing discourse about America’s place in the postwar

world but successfully manipulated this discourse to create a strategy of

containment that went far beyond a simple defensive posture and thus represented

significant ideological innovation. Nevertheless, the path to the Truman Doctrine

and NSC-68 was one of contestation and ultimately ideological novelty; it defies

proleptic characterisation.

Luce had acknowledged U.S. responsibilities but had failed to delineate them and

had delegitimised postwar Soviet interests. Subtleties such as Lippmann’s

warning that U.S. postwar military superiority should not be confused with the

salvation of humankind had been subsumed. While adopting Lippmann’s

rejection of isolationism, NSC-68 disregarded his plea that America not police the

world. Perhaps most importantly, the Truman Doctrine had asserted the

universality of American values, suggesting that a threat to ‘free’ nations was a

threat to U.S. national security. Although Luce, Lippmann, and Kennan were clear

about the need for U.S. engagement with the world, none of them fully defined

the terms of that engagement or specified where it would end.

This chapter represents an attempt to reconstruct what Truman and his advisors

did see and the degree to which they were constrained by and innovated in the

face of the existing context. The foundational texts of the emergent American

grand strategy of containment were the Truman Doctrine speech to Congress and

NSC-68. These texts shared a set of para-ideological convictions. The political

541 John W. Young and John Kent, International Relations Since 1945: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 143.

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innovation of the Truman Doctrine and NSC-68 was to universalise the mission of

American exceptionalism to create a grand strategy that represented a form of

global anti-Communism. It was such a durable ideological innovation that it

would dominate party political foreign-policy debate in the early 1950s and the

policy of containment is still a touchstone of foreign-policy debate. Even Kennan,

despite his haphazard realism, declared that: “Providence . . . [had] made their

entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and

accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly

intended them to bear.”542

542 ‘X’, “Sources of Soviet Conduct,” 582.

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Chapter 5. The Rise and Fall of Détente

The history of U.S. foreign relations has an assortment of terms that encapsulate a

policy, outlook, or approach; these forms of shorthand have varied histories. In

the early 1930s, appeasement first surfaced as a neutral or even positive way of

describing European diplomats’ efforts to deal with Hitler. After the Second

World War it became one of the pejorative labels in the foreign-policy lexicon. As

discussed in Chapter 4, containment emerged as a description of the goal of U.S.

policy with respect to Communist countries.

This chapter will analyse détente’s rise and fall. It will examine the extent to

which détente – usually seen as America’s closest approach to a realist grand

strategy – was nonetheless imbued with ideas of U.S. exceptionalism. This

chapter asserts that détente was chiefly a response to domestic unrest on both the

left and the right of the American political spectrum. Despite these challenges, the

ideological goal of containing Soviet influence did not disappear from American

grand strategy but the methods by which this goal was pursued changed

significantly. Although chiefly identified with the Republican administrations of

the 1970s, détente had a longer lineage, both as a diplomatic device and as a

popular buzzword.543 In analysing the degree of ideological and political

innovation that détente represented, this chapter will consider earlier conceptions

of détente.

This chapter will focus primarily on the reshaping of the term détente in the

Nixon administration (in which it rose to the level of grand strategy) and its

eventual collapse, by which time it had become nearly synonymous with

capitulation and almost as sullied as appeasement. Although U.S. usage of détente

predates the Nixon administration, the Nixon administration was the first to use

the term explicitly to describe its grand strategy. By the end of the Ford

administration, the term was already used only in a historical sense.544 As outlined

in Chapter 1 and applied in Chapter 3, the methodology employed in this chapter

543 For détente’s development strictly within United States foreign policy, see Michael B. Froman, The Development of the Idea of Détente: Coming to Terms (Basingstoke: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991). 544 Ibid., 2 (footnote 2).

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will be a form of Cambridge School contextualism. The approach’s five analytical

steps will structure the chapter.

Step one of contextual analysis: the available meanings of détente and related

concepts

This section will address the contextualist question ‘In writing a text, what was an

author doing in relation to other available texts that made up the ideological

context?’ In particular, the section will identify available meanings of détente and

related concepts that made up the ideological context of the Cold War era.

Like many other terms of diplomacy, détente is a French word. It derives from the

Latin de and tendere and originally had a meaning akin to ‘unstretch’. Originally

applied to the release of a bowstring, détente eventually came to mean a release of

tension between rival states.545 Within the context of the Cold War, the concept of

détente, if not use of the term, can be traced back to early critics of containment.

Walter Lippmann’s powerful critique of both George Kennan’s “X article” and

the Truman Doctrine rejected global containment as a bankrupt policy that would

lead to an unmanageable gap between expansive interests and finite resources.546

America used its policy toward Europe as a guide547 for its policy toward the rest

of the world. As a result the United States would be forced to respond to Soviet

initiatives at her own (America’s) strategically weakest locations around the

world. U.S. interests were not equally significant in all conflicts, and U.S. power

was too limited to meet the demands of a policy that did not differentiate between

central and peripheral interests.548 In squandering U.S. political, military, and

economic resources, global containment would frustrate the United States long

before it frustrated Soviet aggression. Lippmann accepted the division of the

international system into Eastern and Western blocs and suggested that the United

545 Ian Q. R. Thomas, The Promise of Alliance: Nato and the Political Imagination (Lanham, Md.; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 88. 546 Lippmann, Cold War. 547 Jussi M. Hanhimäki, “Détente in Perspective,” in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, ed. Odd Arne Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 333. 548 Coral Bell, The Diplomacy of Detente: The Kissinger Era (London: Martin Robertson, 1977), 51–60.

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States negotiate a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union to regulate and thus limit

its expansion.549

Although Lippmann’s detailed critique of the “X article” failed to include an

alternative vision of the international system (and America’s proper role within

that system), twenty years later Lippmann’s vision of the potential for living

alongside an adversarial power started to come into U.S. policy. Even in the

1950s, it planted the seeds for the possibility of a less costly way of containing

Soviet influence than the global commitment of NSC-68. In Lippmann’s

conception of national security,

A nation is secure to the extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes to avoid war, and is able, if challenged, to maintain them by victory in such a way.550

While rejecting the Truman Doctrine’s universalist orientation, Lippmann

unabashedly advocated an internationalist line for U.S. foreign policy. In the

realm of policymaking, a statesman’s ultimate challenge was to articulate and

pursue a foreign policy sustainable within the limits and possibilities of the

domestic consensus. In his Harvard University doctoral dissertation, Henry

Kissinger underscored this position when he described the ability to form

consensus around it as “the acid test of a policy.”551

Along with Lippmann, former Vice-President Henry Wallace was a prominent

critic of containment because encircling the Soviet Union would destabilise U.S.–

Soviet relations and increase the chances of war.552 A third branch of criticism of

containment emerged during the 1952 presidential campaign, when vice-

presidential nominee Richard Nixon attacked containment as acceptance of the

status quo in Eastern Europe and proposed instead a strategy of liberation or

rollback.553 John Foster Dulles, who would become President Eisenhower’s most

important foreign-policy advisor, had been equally critical of containment.

Although Lippmann, Wallace, and some Republicans criticised containment on

549 Louisa Sue Hulett, Decade of Detente: Shifting Definitions and Denouement (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), 3. 550 Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy, 51. 551 Henry Kissinger, A World Restored (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 326. 552 Henry A. Wallace, The Price of Free World Victory (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1942). 553 Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 110.

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substantially different grounds, together they laid the foundation for détente. Each

asserted that containment was unsustainable: Lippmann because it was unfeasible,

Wallace because it was unstable, and the Republicans because it was inadequate.

Lippmann and Wallace recommended that the United States accept the status quo

in Europe; the Republicans advocated rollback.

Détente also had domestic roots in the New Look Doctrine that Dulles presented

in his 1954 “massive retaliation” speech.554 Eisenhower shared Lippmann’s

concerns about the gap between limited U.S. resources and expansive global

interests. He took this gap into account in developing both his strategic doctrine

and his diplomatic strategy. As viewed by the Eisenhower administration, this was

not simply a means of containing Soviet influence but also a means of

transforming the Soviet system in a way that containment had failed to do.555

In response to Truman’s mobilisation posture, Dulles favoured a comprehensive

strategy of deterrence. For reasons of cost, ease, and political persuasion, Dulles

emphasised the strategic deterrent of massive retaliatory power.556 The press

immediately seized on the slogan ‘massive retaliation’ and “portrayed it as a

formula for turning every border skirmish into a nuclear showdown.”557 Attempts

to clarify the meaning of the “massive retaliation” address could not overcome its

contradictory logic. Critics quickly attacked the doctrine on the basis of military

effectiveness, cost, and ability to be implemented, while Maxwell Taylor

(Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff) suggested that more emphasis should be placed on

the ability to stop crisis escalation.558

The New Look Doctrine offered a vision of a postwar world in which the United

States could impose its notion of strategic stability on the Soviet Union, thereby

ensuring international order on the basis of U.S. technological superiority. This

554 John Foster Dulles, “The Evolution of Foreign Policy,” U.S. Department of State Bulletin, no. 30 (25 January 1954): 107–10. 555 Samuel F. Wells, “The Origins of Massive Retaliation,” Political Science Quarterly, 96, no. 1 (1981): 31–52; Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Froman, The Development of the Idea of Détente, 11. 556 Dulles, “The Evolution of Foreign Policy,” 110. 557 Robert Litwak, Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 26. 558 See Paul Peeters, Massive Retaliation: The Policy and Its Critics (Chicago, Ill.: H. Regnery Co., 1959); Maxwell D. Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet (New York: Harper, 1960).

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vision would find clear articulation in détente. Dulles’s speech and U.S.

overreliance on nuclear weapons provided no answer to the challenge of local

aggression. To many strategic analysts, the existence of nuclear weapons

demanded development of a strategic doctrine and of the ability to conduct

limited wars along the periphery. Dulles’s speech focused attention on the

problems of limited war and initiated an animated public debate.559

Henry Kissinger wrote an article on the problems of defending “gray-areas.”560

The article’s policy prescriptions strikingly resemble Nixon Doctrine proposals of

a quarter-century later. Kissinger argued that stable indigenous governments were

prerequisites of effective local action by the United States. Perhaps

unsurprisingly, Kissinger did not challenge the political assumptions then

governing U.S. strategy. Although he extensively explored the prerequisites of

limited war in terms of U.S. doctrine and capability, he did not question the

political framework itself, the prevailing bipolar, zero-sum image of the

international system.

Although the Nixon administration was the first to use the word détente, texts of

earlier presidential administrations referred to advanced forms of cooperation.

During the period of relative calm after the Cuban missile crisis, European powers

pressed the superpowers to reduce U.S.–Soviet tensions. French president Charles

de Gaulle visited Moscow and sent diplomats to Eastern European capitals.

During the same period561 West Germany started to modify its hard-line policy

toward Communist countries. This pursuit of Ostpolitik (dynamic Eastern policy)

was initially cautious, but after Willy Brandt became chancellor in 1969 Bonn

forcefully moved toward normalising relations with the East, recognising East

Germany and the postwar status quo beyond the Elbe.562

559 For a detailed examination of the debate see Jane E. Stromseth, The Origins of Flexible Response: NATO’s Debate over Strategy in the 1960s (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). 560 Henry Kissinger, “Military Policy and the Defense of ‘Gray Areas’,” Foreign Affairs, 33, no. 3 (1955): 416–28. 561 François Puaux, “Dealing with the Russians: Conceptions of Détente,” The European Journal of International Affairs, no. 9 (1990), 110–11. 562 Arne Hofmann, The Emergence of Détente in Europe: Brandt, Kennedy and the Formation of Ostpolitik (London; New York: Routledge, 2007).

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Even while he explored avenues for cooperation in the East, President Johnson

did not use the term détente,563 speaking instead of “building bridges” between

West and East. He first used that phrase in 1964, and it soon became his regular

formulation for policy toward the Soviet bloc.564 The Johnson administration

could not avoid the use of the word détente altogether, however. It appeared in a

1967 NATO document after, in December 1966, the Belgian foreign minister,

Pierre Harmel, advocated a NATO initiative to assess the alliance’s future in the

wake of French withdrawal from NATO’s military command. In 1967 NATO

formally adopted the initiative, which embraced the intention to “further a détente

in East–West relations.”565 NATO stated:

The relaxation of tensions is not the final goal but is part of a long-term process to promote better relations and to foster a European settlement. The ultimate political purpose of the Alliance is to achieve a just and lasting peaceful order in Europe accompanied by appropriate security guarantees.566

Given détente’s European origins it is not surprising that some of the constitutive

and regulative conventions of pre-Nixonian détente are visible in the declamatory

texts of Konrad Adenauer. In the early 1960s, seizing on West German public

opinion, Adenauer declared himself “the peace chancellor.” He would provide

some of the contextual architecture that Nixon and Kissinger would later adapt for

their own form of détente. Adenauer was attempting to counter what he saw as the

empty materialism of East–West rivalry and the threat of nuclear conflict. Seeking

to connect his political activities to a deeper reservoir of religious belief, he hoped

to reawaken public interest in a ‘Christian’ vision of a simple, devout life free of

military tensions and centralised institutions.567

The immediate threat to Adenauer’s bourgeois utopian vision was that “The epoch

in which we live is characterised by the contradiction between communism and

563 And in so doing he denied the impression that de Gaulle was driving U.S. policy. 564 John Dumbrell, President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Communism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 18; Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, 1971), 471–3. 565 NATO Communiqué, “The Future Tasks of the Alliance: Report of the Council” (1971) in Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American–Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994), 128. 566 Ibid. 567 Jeremi Suri, “Counter-Cultures: The Rebellions against the Cold War Order, 1965–1975,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 462–3.

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anticommunism.”568 Adenauer wanted to foster pan-European unity, to erase the

inheritance of half a century of continental war. Instead of pressuring Moscow,

West Germany and its allies had to stabilise the balance of power.569

Adenauer was early in his awareness of the Sino-Soviet split and that the potential

for a new balance of power could lead to peace. In 1962 and 1963 he and de

Gaulle discussed exploiting that split. Their analysis of the split led to both de

Gaulle’s asking China to pressure the Soviets into a softer foreign-policy line and

Adenauer’s appeals for a U.S.–Soviet agreement on arms control and reduced

tensions in Central Europe. Paris and Bonn worked to present a united Western

front in negotiations. Adenauer also floated the idea of a ten-year freeze in

military action around Central Europe. With the promise of no threats to one

another for a decade, the great powers would experiment with arms control, trade

concessions, and expanded human contacts.570

There was a key difference between Adenauer’s and the then U.S. president John

F. Kennedy’s thoughts on détente. Adenauer sought international stability

primarily in the interests of an Ostpolitik that would improve long-term conditions

in the two Germanys and perhaps foster reunification. In contrast, Kennedy spoke

vaguely of a “new frontier”571 which hinted at universal freedoms. Kennedy did

not fully embrace Adenauer’s vision and, at a policy (if not strategic) level, he

accepted the existing state of affairs in Europe; their shared concern was simply

over the avoidance of military conflict.572

As much as détente was a response to the practical emergence of Ostpolitik in

Europe and its discourse, it was also an ideological response to prolonged

domestic debate questioning the very nature of American ideology. In the 1960s

and 1970s the United States experienced profound social change with

fundamental critiques from both the Left and the Right challenging many

ideological assumptions underlying the Cold War.

568 Konrad Adenauer quoted and translated in Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 27. 569 Suri, Power and Protest, 27–8. 570 Ibid. 571 John F. Kennedy, “Convention acceptance speech, ‘The New Frontier’” (15 July 1960), http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-137–003.aspx [accessed 11/02/11]. 572 Suri, Power and Protest, 28–9.

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American sociologist Daniel Bell, the author of The End of Ideology (1960) was

among the most widely read and influential thinkers who challenged the

American ideological assumptions which had underpinned the start of the Cold

War.573 His central insight was that:

[Out] of all this history, one simple fact emerges: for the radical intelligentsia, the old ideologies have lost their “truth” and their power to persuade.

Few serious minds believe any longer that one can set down “blueprints” and through “social engineering” bring about a new utopia of social harmony. At the same time, the older “counter-beliefs” have lost their intellectual force as well. Few “classic liberals” insist that the State should play no role in the economy, and few serious conservatives . . . believe that the Welfare State is the “road to serfdom”. . . . [T]here is today a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues . . . In that sense, too, the ideological age has ended.574

It was a challenging critique because it asserted that no ideologies were any

longer relevant. Bell’s central insight was that socialism had come to a dead end

and that liberal capitalism was now more focused on restraining domestic pressure

for international change, rather than enabling that change to happen. In a sense he

was stating a defence of the status quo. In a world in which nuclear stalemate was

accepted, there was little left to debate in the established language of international

politics.575 It raised the question of exactly what was left for America to ‘contain’

and by implication suggested an inward focus for American society to rediscover

its utopian impetus. As Bell put it, the old Cold War ideology, “which once was a

road to action, has come to a dead end.”576

In his 1958 book The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith had made a similar

critique of American ideology.577 Galbraith provided much of the lexicon for the

flipside to U.S. exceptionalism. Whilst economic growth during the Eisenhower

administration had been remarkable, Galbraith objected to the inequitable

573 Bell acknowledged an intellectual debt to Albert Camus: see Malcolm Waters, Daniel Bell (London: Routledge, 1996), 78. Waters suggests that Bell’s polemical title became a popular cultural shorthand. 574 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties: With a New Afterword (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 393. 575 Waters, Daniel Bell, 81.; Nathan Liebowitz, Daniel Bell and the Agony of Modern Liberalism (Westport, Conn.; London: Greenwood, 1985), 144–51. 576 Bell, The End of Ideology, 402–3. 577 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).

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distribution of the nation’s wealth and criticized national policy as blind to

economic inequality.

The arguments of Galbraith, Harrington, and Bell were not entirely new.

However, what was new was that these arguments occurred at the height of

American economic and international political hegemony.

Galbraith stated:

We can no longer afford the notion that foreign policy is a dance, an intricate minuet, which some people, peculiarly endowed with skill, experience, or a penchant for fast foot-work can do with unique proficiency. . . . I would hope that our foreign policy would soon become the subject of the same kind of social and political debate that focused the conflicting attitudes towards the New and Fair deals.578

Neither Bell or Galbraith were directly critiquing foreign policy but their work did

attack the ideological core of postwar America and provided a powerful new

lexicon for criticising the status quo’s shortcomings. Their writing made clear that

not only was it no longer clear exactly what America was defending (either

ideologically or materially) but it was becoming apparent that the ideological

‘necessity’ of containment was having a detrimental economic impact on the very

society it was meant to protect.

Not all critics of U.S. stagnation were on the political Left. Eisenhower’s

domestic and foreign policy evoked the wrath of so-called new conservatives such

as William F. Buckley, Jr. and Barry Goldwater. Their voices made it difficult for

Republicans to point to conservative support in favour of preserving the status

quo.579

Buckley, one of this new breed of conservatives, called for a stronger defence of

U.S. ideals. Instead of affirming enduring moral principles vested in the dignity of

the individual, Cold War discourse focused exclusively on technocratic methods

and means without inherent value. Denouncing theories of development and

democratisation closely connected with U.S. foreign policy, Buckley stated “Our

preoccupation these days . . . is not so much with the kind of society democracy

578 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, quoted in Suri, Power and Protest, 98. 579 Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” The American Historical Review, 99, no. 2 (1994): 409–29.

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brings forth in a given political situation, as with democracy itself.” Democracy,

he continued, “has no program. It cannot say to its supporters: do thus, and ye

shall arrive at the promised land.”580

In his 1961 book Up from Liberalism, Buckley explicitly attacked The Affluent

Society. Nonetheless, the two texts are close in terms of sentiment. Both were

critiques of U.S. society during the Cold War and the type of thought that had

created that society. In a sense, Buckley was echoing Bell and Galbraith’s fear

that the ideological core of America no longer matched its material prosperity.

Another powerful critic on the right was Barry Goldwater, a U.S. senator from

Arizona. Although he lost the presidential election, Goldwater inspired the ‘New

Right’ movement at about the same time that the ‘New Left’ began to emerge. His

1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative reinvigorated American

conservatism and added weight to criticism of perceived American decline.581

Goldwater spoke of “victory” in the Cold War as the result of superior U.S.

capabilities. “Peace,” he stated:

is a proper goal for American policy – as long as it is understood that peace is not all we seek. . . . A tolerable peace . . . must follow victory over Communism. We have been fourteen years trying to bury that unpleasant fact. It cannot be buried and any foreign policy that ignores it will lead to our extinction as a nation.582

Much like Buckley, Goldwater wanted a renewed “moral” purpose in American

society. He focused his efforts on creating a more muscular, offensive U.S.

foreign policy supported by reawakened patriotism at home. Calls for “victory”

against Communism provided an organising mission that Goldwater thought was

missing from current Western leadership. He explained, “If our objective is

victory over Communism, we must achieve superiority in all of the weapons –

military, as well as political and economic – that may be useful in reaching that

goal.”583

580 William F. Buckley, Up from Liberalism (New York: McDowell, 1959), 114–15. 581 Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 61–8. 582 Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, Ky.: Victor Pub. Co., 1960), 90. 583 Ibid., 110–11.

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As a senator, Goldwater had concentrated on defence policy and there was a

degree of ideological continuity in his espousal of American exceptionalism in his

race for the Republican presidential candidacy. The U.S. government would use

overwhelming strength to protect its interests and otherwise avoid entanglements

that stifled creativity and hindered independent action. Goldwater wanted

Washington to lead at home and abroad without becoming needlessly encumbered

in complex arrangements with allies or adversaries.584 In contrast to Bell’s

argument about the effects of American prosperity, Goldwater argued that

America’s military muscle and growing prosperity should serve as a beacon of

freedom, not a restricting arm of the administration. In other words, he was

espousing total victory over the Soviets. When asked in an interview whether

disarmament negotiations were possible with the Soviets, he responded, “I don’t

think negotiations are possible . . . If you mean what you say, Mr. Khruschev, put

up or shut up – as we Western poker players say.”585

It was in this context that Nixon came to power. As Melvin Small has noted, 1968

was “the foreign policy election of the twentieth century.”586 He faced the

challenge of seizing the initiative from the Europeans before Ostpolitik wrested

the political initiative from America’s hand. More significantly, America was in

the midst of domestic ideological turmoil. Profound critiques from both the left

and the right linked her domestic situation, her state of ideological torpor, to her

foreign policy. Nixon and Kissinger’s challenge was to transform the ideological

discourse of American grand strategy. Nixon’s response was to attempt to move

from “an era of confrontation” to “an era of negotiation.”587

Step two of contextual analysis: Nixon’s and Kissinger’s use of the word

détente in relation to the practical context

Step two of Skinnerian contextual analysis addresses the question ‘In producing a

text, what was the author doing in relation to available and problematic political

action that made up the practical context?’ It is important to understand Nixon’s 584 James Reichley, Conservatives in an Age of Change: The Nixon and Ford Administrations (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1981), 26–8. 585 Barry Goldwater quoted in Perlstein, Before the Storm, 267. 586 Melvin Small, “The Election of 1968,” Diplomatic History, 28, no. 4 (2004): 513. 587 Richard M. Nixon, “Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union” (22 January 1970), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=2921#axzz1buEsFb2O [accessed 25/03/11].

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and Kissinger’s588 use of the term détente in relation to the available practical

political context.

Before the Nixon administration, presidential administrations had sometimes

indicated a sense of moving toward limited U.S.–Soviet cooperation. However,

their dominant foreign-policy arguments had focused on means of containment

rather than serious challenges to containment; they had assumed that containment

was legitimate and viable.

The Vietnam War caused significant changes in U.S. foreign-policy discourse.

First, the war cast doubt on the efficacy of U.S. military intervention, which failed

to bring political success in Vietnam and proved costly in terms of lives and

resources. Second, aspects of the conflict challenged the morality of the U.S.

exceptionalism that had sustained the policy of containment.589 Third, the war

destroyed the U.S. bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, which had largely been

in place since Eisenhower outmanoeuvred the remaining Republican isolationists

and cemented the foreign-policy consensus started under Truman.590

The defence of freedom, capitalism, and liberal democracy – which the political

elite had seen as a duty on the grounds of both self-interest and ideology – had

resulted in a policy of undifferentiated globalism that proved disastrous in

Vietnam. Equally, the Sino-Soviet split and the Soviet Union’s problematic

attempts to maintain cohesion in Eastern Europe reduced the perceived power of

America’s adversaries. The confidence and sense of purpose so evident in the

earlier post-Second World War period had given way to demoralisation and

disarray. The spectre of U.S. decline reared its head.

588 This chapter sees both Nixon and Kissinger as ideological innovators. They had a unique relationship in government and Kissinger is perhaps better referred to as the architect of détente than Nixon. This chapter has made use of a number of works on Kissinger (many falling into the category of intellectual biography). See Jussi M. Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Mario Del Pero, The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010). 589 Bell, The Diplomacy of Détente, 45–6. 590 Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, “Waging War on All Fronts: Nixon Kissinger and the Vietnam War 1969–1972,” in Nixon in the World: American Foreign Relations, 1969–1977, ed. Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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By the time Nixon was elected president in 1968 there was an opportunity to

remould U.S. foreign policy. This chapter has already noted some attempts by

previous presidents to craft a U.S.–Soviet relationship of competitive

confrontation combined with mutual restraint. The adversarial elements remained

dominant. Events had severely circumscribed presidents’ freedom to move toward

U.S.–Soviet détente.

As a foreign-policy hard-liner, Nixon had more room to manoeuvre than other

presidents, unfettered by the possibility of political attacks for being soft on

Communism. In addition, because of the Vietnam War, the conservatives in

Congress and the executive branch were on the defensive, and liberals were all too

aware of the costs of continued superpower competition.

Nixon’s and Kissinger’s conception of détente was less revolutionary than

generally believed in terms of adjusting U.S. objectives. Their conception was

genuinely revolutionary, however, in terms of how these objectives were to be

achieved. Nixon did not abandon long-term concerns about the Soviet threat to

U.S. security or give up on the goal of containment. In the past, containment had

depended on U.S. power and Soviet caution. Instead, the aim was now to make

containment depend on Soviet self-restraint or ‘self-containment’.591

Early in his career Nixon had reservations about détente. As late as 1967 he

maintained that “Our goal is different from theirs. We seek peace as an end in

itself. They seek victory, with peace being at this time a means towards that

end.”592 In office Nixon endorsed the idea of détente but initially avoided using

the word.593 When Nixon entered the White House in January 1969, détente was

still a largely European concept,594 but whereas Europeans conceived of détente in

European terms, as de Gaulle’s initiatives and Ostpolitik suggested, Nixon’s and

Kissinger’s use of the term was global in conception.595 In addition, Nixon and

Kissinger had doubts regarding the European meaning of détente. Kissinger

wrote:

591 Stanley Hoffman, Dead Ends: American Foreign Policy in the New Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1983), 90. 592 Nixon, RN: The Memoirs, 284. 593 Litwak, Détente, 64. 594 Froman, The Development of the Idea of Détente, 32–3. 595 Thomas, The Promise of Alliance, 101.

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In times of rising tension, the Europeans feared American rigidity; in times of relaxing tension, they dreaded a U.S.–Soviet condominium. They urged us to be firm, then offered their mediation to break the resulting deadlock. They insisted that we consult with them before we did anything, but they wanted the freedom and autonomy to pursue their own détente diplomacy without restraint. If we were perceived to block détente, we would loose the support of our West European allies, who would then speed up their own contacts with the East, with no coordinated strategy.596

The apparent solution was for the United States to accept détente in theory while

assuming leadership on détente and steering policy in the direction U.S. officials

thought best. Kissinger explained: “We came to the conclusion that we could best

hold the Alliance together by accepting the principle of détente, but establishing

clear criteria to determine its course.”597

Nixon heralded U.S. leadership on détente when he announced in 1971 that he

would travel to China to reopen U.S.–China relations. Whatever its strategic

importance, the act had the effect of dwarfing European measures while opening

the way to improved relations between Washington and Moscow. By February

1972 Nixon was in Moscow signing the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT)

and announcing the twelve ‘Moscow Principles’ that would form the basis for

U.S.–Soviet relations during the period of détente. In Washington the summit

meeting was seen as having broad implications.598

Nixon’s rhetoric of strength disguised the situation’s novelty. Presidential foreign-

policy reports to Congress stressed that negotiation with adversaries was only one

prong of a three-pronged approach. The United States would maintain its military

strength while encouraging its allies to share more of the burdens and

responsibilities of Western security. The means of U.S. foreign policy

substantially shifted, and a reduction in military spending provided a substantial

‘peace dividend’ over and above that which resulted from reduced involvement in

Vietnam. Self-reliance was replaced by reliance on others. The Soviet Union was

being relied on to exercise self-restraint, which would allow the United States to

596 Kissinger and Luce, White House Years, 94. 597 Ibid., 404; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 733–7. 598 Garthoff, Détente, 325–6.

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engage in “the orderly devolution of American power to incipient regional

powers.”599

Of these ideas, reliance on allies was least innovative. The notion of a division of

labour in which U.S. allies would provide the local defence components of

containment, backed by U.S. strategic power, had been a prominent theme of

Eisenhower’s administration, which had been concerned with minimising the

economic costs of military containment. The Nixon–Kissinger approach was

similarly concerned with the cheap maintenance of containment.

The encouragement of Soviet self-restraint was the innovative component of

Nixon’s détente. Unrestrained superpower competition had become too expensive

militarily and too divisive domestically. Instead of opting out of the competition,

the Nixon administration attempted to co-opt the U.S.S.R as a willing partner in

regulating that competition. The more the military dimension was regulated, the

easier it would be for the United States to successfully compete diplomatically

and politically, hence the early emphasis on strategic arms control. Nixon hoped

that strategic arms control would provide long-term stability to U.S.–Soviet

relations.600

The second element of the regulatory process was to establish a code of conduct

for operations in the Third World, a superpower agreement to refrain from

attempts to obtain a unilateral advantage. It was recognised in Washington that

such an agreement was unenforceable. Therefore, the third element of the U.S.

strategy was designed to ensure that the U.S.S.R. followed the rules. This was

known as linkage. Positive inducements (such as trade) and negative sanctions

could encourage Soviet self-restraint.601

If this approach succeeded, the Soviet Union would not take advantage of U.S.

military retrenchment and the United States would maintain containment by

proxy. For the strategy to succeed, however, several conditions had to be met.

First, smaller nations must be able and willing to comply with the Nixon–

Kissinger grand strategy and replace U.S. commitment and power. Second, the 599 Litwak, Détente, 54. 600 Froman, The Development of the Idea of Détente, 56; Garthoff, Détente, 215, 216; Del Pero, The Eccentric Realist, 121; Litwak, Détente, 29. 601 Garthoff, Détente, 35, 36; Litwak, Détente, 89–91.

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Soviet Union must be prepared to go along with the strategy as intended. Third,

the Nixon administration must be able to establish and maintain a consensus in

favour of détente.

In large part, Nixon’s conception and articulation of détente were governed by the

conventions of containment, but they also represented careful manipulation of

traditional conventions of U.S. foreign policy. Détente’s ultimate downfall shows

the limits of twisting and stretching an ideology. The Nixon administration failed

to develop a domestic base sufficiently robust to sustain the détente policy,

especially after its initial architects had disappeared from the scene.

Step three of contextual analysis: Nixonian détente as an ideological move

The third step of Skinnerian contextual analysis involves identifying an ideology

and surveying how it formed, how it was criticised, and how it changed. It is

concerned with identifying how and when the constitutive and regulative

conventions of détente were manipulated by Nixon and Kissinger. This section

will apply step three to the ideology of Nixonian détente.

Even as he formalised the policy of détente, Nixon eschewed the label itself.

During his first term as president he rarely used the word. Nevertheless, Nixonian

détente represented an ideological move even if the move was less of an

ideological shift from containment. Where President Johnson had favoured the

phrase “building bridges”, Nixon came to prefer “structure of peace”. The Nixon

volumes of Public Papers of the Presidents contain no index entry for détente.602

In contrast, the volumes for Gerald Ford’s presidency have numerous index

entries for the term.603 It was not until the signing of a series of bilateral

agreements in May 1972 that U.S. government officials labelled U.S. policy

towards the Soviet Union as détente.

When de Gaulle gave the term fresh currency in the late 1950s, détente was used

to describe the first step of a process that was to lead through entente to

602 Richard M. Nixon and KTO Press, The Cumulated Indexes to the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, 1969–1974 (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1978). 603 Wendell H. Ford and W. Landis Jones, The Public Papers of Governor Wendell H. Ford, 1971–1974. The Public Papers of the Governors of Kentucky (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1978).

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cooperation and security between Eastern and Western Europe. For de Gaulle,

détente was to result in the restoration of political independence to continental

Europe.604 In Germany, which adapted its own form of détente in the form of

Ostpolitik, American détente came to stand for abandonment of the Hallstein

Doctrine, which emphasised national reunification,605 in favour of opportunities to

engage in diplomatic and economic relations with Eastern Europe. In all three

cases, détente was used to increase the room for domestic political manoeuvre.606

The cautious, uninspired Nixon campaign for the presidency in 1968 gave little

indication that the new administration’s foreign policy would co-opt, or be

constrained by, any of the decade’s ideological fervour. Nonetheless, Nixon

believed that the United States was likely to win the East–West competition. He

contended that the “American Revolution . . . is the way of the future”607 and that

the “people of this earth, including those in the Soviet Union, will inevitably

demand and obtain more and more freedom.”608 At the same time, he concluded

that the West should not consider itself invincible.609

Echoing both the New Left and the New Right, Nixon maintained that the danger

confronting the United States was not a superior Communist system but internal

disintegration. In language strikingly similar to President Kennedy’s, Nixon

stated:

History is full of examples of civilizations with superior ideas which have gone to defeat because their adversaries had more will to win, more raw strength physically, mentally and emotionally, to throw into the critical battles.610

He also remarked, “We know from history that great nations have become

corrupt, soft, and decadent under the influence of prosperity.”611 The latter quote

in particular appeared to be a reworking of both Bell and Goldwater, but

604 Puaux, “Dealing with the Russians,” 112–14. 605 Hofmann, The Emergence of Détente in Europe, 152; Froman, The Development of the Idea of Détente, 33. 606 Bell, The Diplomacy of Détente, 15. 607 Richard M. Nixon, The Challenges We Face, Edited and Compiled from the Speeches and Papers of Richard M. Nixon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), 3. 608 Ibid., 46. 609 Ibid., 25. 610 Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), 282. 611 Nixon, The Challenges We Face, 7.

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refashioned with the echo of decadent decline from Gibbon’s The History of the

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.612

Nixon lamented the relative decline in U.S. resources: “Every well has a bottom.

. . . [T]here is an inevitable limit to what we can do.”613 However, he was less

concerned about the quantity of available resources than about the will and

determination necessary to use those resources effectively. “Weary with war,

disheartened with allies, disillusioned with aid, dismayed at domestic crises, many

Americans are heeding the call of the new isolationism.”614

As evidenced in the article “Asia after Vietnam,” Nixon linked domestic political

and ideological change with foreign policy.615 Although the article displayed

much familiar Cold War rhetoric, it was a harbinger of two of Nixon’s most

important foreign-policy initiatives, the Nixon Doctrine as a formula for politico-

military retrenchment and the opening of U.S.–China relations. Nixon discerned

that American attitudes had changed. Having severely strained the United States,

the Vietnam War had prompted the social and political debate discussed above; it

had shattered the foreign-policy consensus that had supported two decades of U.S.

globalism. According to Nixon, the United States could not continue to police the

world because it did not have a sufficiently robust political consensus to use its

resources effectively. He stated:

If another friendly country should be faced with an externally supported communist insurrection – whether in Asia, or in Africa or even Latin America – there is serious question whether the American public or the American Congress would now support unilateral American intervention, even at the request of the host government.616

Given that the U.S. experience of the Vietnam War portended a decline in U.S.

activism, Nixon pointed to nascent regionalism as a more indirect channel for

U.S. influence. As in the Nixon Doctrine, he contended that the United States

should offer direct military assistance only when doing so would significantly

affect the political outcome and serve U.S. interests:

612 See Chapter 3 for earlier rhetorical comparisons between Roman decadence and possible fates for the Union. 613 Nixon, The Challenges We Face, 143. 614 Richard M. Nixon, “Asia after Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs, 46, no. 1 (1967),121–4. 615 Ibid. 616 Ibid., 124.

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If the initial response to a threatened aggression . . . can be made by lesser powers in the immediate area and thus within the path of aggression, . . . the world is spared the consequences of great power action. . . . Only if the buffer proves insufficient does the great power become involved, and then in terms that make victory more attainable and the enterprise more palatable.617

Nixon’s early concept of détente focused not only on changing Soviet foreign

policy but on the value of U.S.–Soviet coexistence. Although Nixon was sceptical

about negotiations, he considered them necessary:

The alternative – to have no negotiations – would mean, obviously, that we would lessen our chances of achieving agreements with the Communists – slim as these chances might be. And that might mean, in turn, heading into an armed clash which could destroy civilisation as we know it.618

The dichotomy between ‘the sword of annihilation’ and negotiations laid the

foundation for the value that Nixon attributed, as president, to the process and

results of negotiation. Although limited as a tool of transformation, negotiations

facilitated efforts by the United States and Soviet Union to manage their

competitive relationship. The less effective détente proved as a means of

transformation the more valuable it became as an expression of U.S.–Soviet

coexistence.

These documents echo some early ideas of European Ostpolitik, encapsulating the

drawback from superpower conflict and the threat of nuclear exchange as well as

relative regional independence in handling conflict. However, Nixon primarily

referred to crisis management rather than longer-term structural change in

international affairs of the type Adenauer had desired. Nixon also echoed

Goldwater’s rhetoric. The New Right’s demands necessitated the reminder that

‘victory’ remained the strategic ‘end’.

However, this did not represent a radical philosophical break with familiar tropes

of America’s global role. Nixon was not acknowledging revolutionary

independence in Vietnam, the Congo, or other points of Cold War conflict –

independence that might have appealed to Galbraith. Nor was it clear how

Nixon’s criteria for foreign intervention would be judged in practice. These

617 Ibid., 114–15. 618 Nixon, The Challenges We Face, 83.

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criteria showed prescience regarding the U.S. use of peripheral interventionist

force, but nonetheless Nixon’s article “Asia After Vietnam” and, later, the Nixon

Doctrine itself were strategically incoherent in that they failed to differentiate the

categories and levels of possible threat. The criteria were not specific enough to

facilitate actual choices for or against intervention. Nevertheless, the article served

a domestic purpose in reaffirming the validity of U.S. overseas commitments.

“Asia After Vietnam” anticipated the Nixon administration’s ground-breaking

China initiative. While advocating a change in U.S. policy in order to “come

urgently to grips with the reality of China,”619 Nixon continued to regard the

People’s Republic of China as an implacable revolutionary power. In Nixon’s

eyes, a true U.S.-Sino rapprochement would require evidence of China’s

transformation from a revolutionary power into a status-quo-orientated power. At

first glance, this approach fully accords with the era’s prevailing view that the

United States could impose stability on China. However, the familiar anti-

Communist rhetoric belied a subtle shift toward a more flexible and pragmatic

approach to U.S. relations with China.

Nixon forcefully argued that developing a strong indigenous regional security

system in Asia would best limit Chinese expansionism and thereby accelerate

China’s transformation into a rational, status-quo-orientated power:

The primary restraint on China’s Asian ambitions should be exercised by the Asian nations in the path of those ambitions, backed by the ultimate power of the United States. This is sound strategically, sound psychologically and sound in terms of the dynamics of Asian development. Only as the nations of non-communist Asia become so strong – economically, politically and militarily – that they will no longer furnish tempting targets for Chinese aggression, will the leaders in Peking be persuaded to turn their energies inwards rather than outward. And that will be the time when the dialogue with mainland China can begin.620

Unsurprisingly, such language leads to the question of whether the Nixon

administration had embraced a new image of the international system or merely

sought new instruments with which to achieve, in the post-Vietnam War period,

U.S. foreign policy’s familiar ends of containment and orderly change.

619 Nixon, “Asia After Vietnam,” 121. 620 Ibid., 121, 123.

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Step four of contextual analysis: détente and the alteration of political

vocabulary

Skinner’s fourth step of contextual analysis addresses the question ‘What relation

between political ideology and political action best explains the diffusion of

certain ideologies, and what effect does this have on political behaviour?’ Skinner

posited that any political vocabulary contains a number of intersubjectively

normative terms. Such terms not only describe but also evaluate. A term’s

evaluative dimension is called its speech-act potential, which may be positive or

negative. According to Skinner, a society establishes and alters its moral identity

by manipulating intersubjectively normative terms. Using these terms in a

conventional way legitimates existing practice. Using them in a way that changes

their meaning or speech-act potential challenges prevailing ideology.621 Skinner

stated:

The problem facing an agent who wishes to legitimate what he is doing at the same time as gaining what he wants cannot simply be the instrumental problem of tailoring his normative language in order to fit his projects. It must in part be the problem of tailoring his projects in order to fit the available normative language.622

The constraint has ideological and political aspects. When attempting to ‘stretch’

an ideological convention, an author usually grounds the change in that which is

already accepted. An ideologist changes one aspect of an ideology by maintaining

another aspect. The prevailing ideology limits the extent to which the author can

legitimate particular political conduct. As a result, even if an ideological innovator

does not believe in what they are espousing they are, to some extent, required to

act in conformity with the established ideology within which they situate

themselves.623

This perhaps explains the ideological failure of détente to become ‘conventional’

in the way that containment did. It is important to note that this is different to

evaluating whether détente was successful in its own strategic terms. Successive

administrations failed to articulate a coherent, consistent concept of détente

around which the American public could rally. The lack of coherence is partly

621 Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1: xii–xiii. 622 Ibid. 623 Ibid.

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explained by tension between the U.S. goal of transforming aspects of the Soviet

Union and the U.S. interest in U.S.–Soviet coexistence. Transformation goals

ranged from modifying Soviet foreign policy to changing the nature of the Soviet

system. These goals were based on the American belief that the United States

could not live with the Soviet Union as it was. However, there was never

consensus as to whether the Soviet Union had to change fundamentally or only

with respect to particular behaviour.624

The U.S. interest in U.S.–Soviet coexistence was based on the beliefs that the

United States and the Soviet Union could maintain a stable, productive

relationship without a fundamental Soviet transformation and that the

superpowers’ shared interests (particularly in avoiding nuclear war) outweighed

their competing interests. This did not mean that current Soviet policies were

acceptable; it meant that they need only be moderated rather than fundamentally

transformed. There never was a consensus as to how to balance the need to

moderate Soviet policies against the need for cooperation.

John Lewis Gaddis suggested that the goal of transformation is often associated

with containment and the value of coexistence with détente. In his view this

binary was incorrect because at times containment also required coexistence: “The

idea of containment has taken on not only a life of its own, but several lives; . . .

different people – indeed, different administrations – have understood it to stand

for very different things over the years.”625

For example, within the context of a divided Europe, containment was understood

to entail both the recognition of spheres of influence and an effort to modify them

– that is, both an acceptance of the status quo and a means of revising it. In

addition, U.S. foreign policy has usually been a mix of containment and détente

rather than a stark choice between the two:626 at the peak of Cold War

containment U.S. administrations sought to relax U.S.–Soviet tensions, and at the

height of détente they sought to contain Soviet influence.

624 Litwak, Détente, 40, 102, 153; Garthoff, Détente, 39. 625 Terry L. Deibel and John Lewis Gaddis, Containment: Concept and Policy, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1986), 4. 626 Alton Frye, “Inching Beyond Containment: Détente, Entente, Condominium – and Orchestraint,” in Containment: Concept and Policy, ed. Terry L. Deibel and John Lewis Gaddis, Vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1986), 643.

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Détente and containment significantly differed, however, with respect to the role

of negotiations in U.S. foreign policy:

“Orthodox” containment, as it was articulated during the first decade or so following the Second World War, placed very little emphasis on negotiations between Washington and Moscow. The U.S.S.R. was considered to be virtually impermeable; the purpose of containment was to erect a barrier (what an earlier generation called a cordon sanitaire) behind which the Soviet state might evolve in more benign directions.627

Unlike containment, détente suggested both a process and a state of relations in

which the United States and Soviet Union realised the value of coexistence.

Détente was grounded in the belief that the two nations must cooperate in order to

prevent competition from precipitating crises, which could escalate into war. It

did not imply an absence of conflict, but suggested that the two nations’ shared

interests were more important than their competing interests.

To understand and evaluate Nixonian détente it is necessary to understand the

normative vocabulary of Nixon and his more scholarly advisor Kissinger.

Kissinger considered coexistence – the pursuit of stability and the prevention of

nuclear war – a moral imperative that transcended the gap between revolutionary

and legitimate regimes. He suggested that nuclear vulnerability provided an

incentive for the two types of regimes to reach a modus vivendi,628 which could

not be based solely on good faith or the balance of power. Good faith placed too

much reliance on self-restraint, and the balance of power was too amorphous to be

reliable. Nuclear parity was an incentive, not a substitute, for accommodation.

Nuclear parity in particular created an incentive for the United States and the

Soviet Union to agree on the parameters of legitimate international behaviour.

Although détente required the United States to recognise the Soviet Union as a

strategic equal, the Nixon administration did not consider the Soviet concept of

international behaviour to be equally legitimate.629 Thus, while the discourse of

627 Richard H. Ullman, “Containment and the Shape of the World Politics, 1947–1987,” in Containment: Concept and Policy, ed. Terry L. Deibel and John Lewis Gaddis (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1986), 632. 628 Litwak, Détente, 63. 629 Litwak, Détente, 90; Stanley Hoffmann, Primacy or World Order: American Foreign Policy since the Cold War (New York; London: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 43.

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détente emphasised the equality of the superpowers, the Nixon administration

sought to maintain a U.S. position of primus inter pares.

By means of linkage the United States would encourage the Soviets to adopt its

concept of legitimate international behaviour. Progress in one area would have a

positive effect on other areas. However, if détente comprised a complex web of

interrelated agreements and understandings, the Soviets would be careful not to

jeopardise their gains. This theory of linkage was based on the assumptions that

the United States had a clear conception of a lack of self-restraint and was willing

to sacrifice détente if the Soviets were not able to exercise self-restraint. Claims

that this theory represented a form of realpolitik rather than an ideological

reorganisation of the world were undercut by the fact that the Nixon and Ford

administrations constantly redrew the line for their definition of ‘lack of self-

restraint’, thereby preventing Soviet challenges from destroying détente.

After détente failed to prevent the Middle East War of October 1973, Nixon and

Kissinger remoulded it. They retreated from the idea that détente would prevent

crises and suggested instead that it would help manage crises. Nixon stated:

We both [the U.S. and the Soviets] now realize that we cannot allow our differences in the Mideast to jeopardize even greater interests that we have, for example, in continuing détente in Europe, in continuing negotiations which can lead to a limitation of nuclear arms and eventually reducing the burden of nuclear arms, and in continuing in other ways that can contribute to peace of the world. As a matter of fact, I would suggest that with all the criticism of détente, that without détente, we might have had a major conflict in the Middle East. With détente, we avoided it.630

Kissinger added: “If the Soviet Union and we can work cooperatively, first toward

establishing the cease-fire and then toward promoting a durable settlement in the

Middle East, then the détente will have proved itself.”631

630 Richard M. Nixon, “News Conference” (26 October 1973), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4022#axzz1bzM0wSgt [accessed 05/03/11]. 631 Henry Kissinger, “News Conference” (25 October 1973), in Richard M. Nixon, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Richard M. Nixon: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches and Statements of the President, 1973, Vol. 69 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 591.

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As the rationale for détente weakened, the Nixon administration became almost

desperate in its support for it. Presenting a stark choice between détente and

Armageddon, Nixon asked:

Do we want to go back to a period when the United States and the Soviet Union, the two great superpowers, stood in confrontation against each other and risk a runaway nuclear arms race and also crises in Berlin, in the Mideast, even in Southeast Asia or other places of the world, or do we want to continue on a path in which we recognize our differences but try to recognize also the fact that we must either live together or we will all die together?632

In the aftermath of the Middle East War, the Nixon administration’s conceptual

and normative vocabulary shifted. The administration increasingly emphasised the

role of détente as a step not necessarily toward a better world but away from a

worse one. In doing so, the administration de-emphasised the goal of

transformation and underscored the value of U.S.–Soviet coexistence. The

administration stressed the importance of negotiations in the face of continued

confrontation and equated détente with peace, and peace with morality. As

Kissinger would often repeat, preventing war was moral in and of itself because

“in the nuclear age we are obliged to recognize that the issue of war and peace

also involves human lives and that attainment of peace is a profound moral

concern.”633

Kissinger declared peace “a moral imperative.”634 In the aftermath of the Middle

East War, Kissinger’s realism gave way to the view that peace was the ultimate

objective, one to which all other priorities should be subjugated.

When Ford became president in August 1974, he pledged to continue Nixon’s

foreign policy and retained Kissinger as his chief foreign-policy advisor.

Although U.S.–Soviet relations remained a priority, domestic concerns dominated

the agenda. As the Ford administration continued, the concept and lexicon of

détente became more confused. Ford acknowledged:

I wish there were one simple English word to substitute for détente. Unfortunately, there isn’t. [Détente] means movement away from the

632 Richard M. Nixon, “News Conference” (25 February 1974), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4367#axzz1bzM0wSgt [accessed 05/03/11]. 633 Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy (New York: Norton, 1977), 264. 634 Ibid., 282.

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constant crisis and dangerous confrontations that have characterized relations with the Soviet Union. . . . It represents our best efforts to cool the cold war, which on occasion became too hot for comfort. To me, détente means a fervent desire for peace – but not peace at any price. It means the preservation of fundamental American principles not their sacrifice. . . . Détente means moderate and restrained behaviour between two super powers – not a licence to fish in troubled waters. It means mutual respect and reciprocity – not unilateral concessions or one-sided agreements.635

Ford’s foreign-policy vision was a world away from Goldwater’s emphasis on

‘victory’ as America’s strategic goal, an emphasis that Nixon had assiduously

incorporated in 1967. The Ford administration failed to indicate clearly whether

détente was a means to an end or an end in itself. However, détente increasingly

looked like an ideological end. Kissinger stated:

The United States believes that the policy of relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union is essential for our two countries and for the peace of the world. We have seen no viable alternative to the policy of relaxation of tensions except rhetoric. We will therefore pursue it.636

Ford concurred: “It would be very unwise for a President – me or anyone else – to

abandon détente. I think détente is in the best interest of this country. It is in the

best interest of world stability, world peace.”637

By the time of the 1976 presidential campaign the Ford administration had

stretched the lexicon of détente too far; détente was attacked from both the Right

and the Left. Ronald Reagan focused on détente’s failure to stem the Soviet

military build-up and restrain what he perceived as Soviet aggression.638 His

critique was possible because détente had strayed too far from containment. On

the Left, Henry Jackson and Jimmy Carter criticised détente’s amorality and its

failure to take into account the Soviet Union’s violations of human rights and

subjugation of Eastern Europe. Both sets of criticism focused on the Ford 635 Gerald Ford, “Address in Minneapolis Before the Annual Convention of the American Legion” (19 August 1975), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=5174&st=&st1=#axzz1bzM0wSgt [accessed 05/03/11]. 636 Henry Kissinger, “News Conference” (23 June 1975) in United States Dept. of State Office of Media Services, and United States Dept. of State Office of Public Communication, The Department of State Bulletin, 73, no. 1881 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Public Communication, 1975), 897. 637 Gerald Ford, “Interview for an NBC News Program on American Foreign Policy” (3 January 1976), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=6132&st=&st1=#axzz1bzM0wSgt [accessed 10/03/11]. 638 Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War, 2nd edn. (London: Verso, 1986), 112–15.

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administration’s valuing détente as an expression of U.S.–Soviet coexistence

despite its failure to transform fundamental elements of Soviet domestic or

foreign policy.

Ford continued to defend détente as the least worst alternative:

For a period of 25 years or thereabouts, we had a policy in this country . . . of a cold war. . . . Obviously that policy didn’t prevent war, and it didn’t prevent [the Soviets] from increasing their capability. It seems to me that a policy of negotiation is infinitely better than confrontation, and I think we can point to some success in that regard.639

As Ford narrowed détente to an alternative to the Cold War, there was little left to

the notion of legitimate international behaviour. Kissinger’s initial concept of

détente was based on mutual self-restraint. In three years, détente evolved from a

policy designed to overcome tensions to a policy of easing tensions when a crisis

arose, from the first step toward a community with shared interests to a

phenomenon relevant only to adversaries. Instead of replacing confrontation,

negotiation would coexist with confrontation. Indeed, continued confrontation

necessitated negotiation. To Kissinger, “the reality of competition” illustrated the

“necessity of coexistence.”640 In 1969 Kissinger advocated linkage as a way of

avoiding “the danger that the Soviets will use talks on arms as a safety valve on

intransigence elsewhere.”641 In 1976 he declared:

Limitation of strategic arms is therefore a permanent and global problem that cannot be subordinated to the day-to-day changes in Soviet American relations . . . we should not play with the strategic arms limitation negotiations . . . we will not use it lightly for bargaining purposes in other areas.642

Thus, the Ford administration considered strategic arms limitation not merely an

arms agreement but a process that embodied the quest for an achievement of

peace. This formulation confused functional arrangements with a convergence of

639 Gerald Ford, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session at a Public Forum in Dallas” (30 April 1976), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=5908&st=&st1=#axzz1bzM0wSgt [accessed 05/03/11]. 640 Henry Kissinger, “The Western Alliance: Peace and Moral Purpose” (26 July 1976), in The Department of State Bulletin, 75, no. 1935, 110. 641 Kissinger and Luce, White House Years, 136. 642 Henry Kissinger, “News Conference” (4 January 1976), The Department of State Bulletin, 74, no. 1910, 125–9.

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principles. Agreement on an array of technical issues did not necessarily mean

that the Soviets agreed to U.S. concepts of legitimate behaviour,643 but by the end

of its term the Ford administration suggested that détente was arms control and

arms control was peace.

Step five of contextual analysis: détente’s decline

Step five of Skinnerian contextual analysis addresses the question ‘What forms of

political thought and action are involved in disseminating and conventionalising

ideological change?’ This section will make the case that détente failed to become

conventional.

The extent to which Kissinger and the presidents he served actually believed that

war was likely in the absence of détente remains unknown. However, at each

crisis with the Soviet Union they suggested that the United States could either

continue arms-control negotiations or allow increased instability that might lead

to war. This simplistic dichotomy between détente and war was based on the

assumption that the Soviet Union was far more cavalier about crises than the

United States. That assumption conflicted with Kissinger’s earlier belief that both

superpowers recognised the danger of nuclear war. It also was inconsistent with

Kissinger’s understanding that deterrence, not just détente, played a role in

guaranteeing peace.

When others suggested alternative approaches Kissinger raised the spectre of

instability and war, thereby subjugating all other interests to the cause of peace.

As an academic, Kissinger rejected peace at any price; as a statesman, he was

unwilling to risk sacrificing hard-won achievements of détente.

During the 1976 presidential campaign conservatives criticised détente for not

moderating Soviet involvement in the Third World, while liberals criticised it for

not improving the lives of Soviet and Eastern European peoples.644 Both

conservatives and liberals recognised the benefits of cooperation and valued

balanced, verifiable arms-control agreements, but both had expectations, partly

due to the administration’s statements, that détente would accomplish more.

643 Litwak, Détente, 92. 644 Del Pero, The Eccentric Realist, 113–15.

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Ultimately, the contradictions within détente resulted in its failure to satisfy these

expectations.

By 1976 détente was a controversial term and Kissinger a controversial figure.

Both the Right and the Left criticised détente as too narrow. Ultimately, Nixon

and Kissinger failed to build the political consensus needed for their ideologically

innovative form of détente to become embedded. Initially they accomplished

movement toward such consensus, partly through oversell and partly through

spectacle. Détente’s rhetoric changed from somewhat cautious to somewhat

hyperbolic. Suggestions that the ‘era of confrontation’ was giving way to the ‘era

of negotiation’, as well as references to a ‘new structure of peace’, created

unrealistic expectations.

Détente never achieved ideological consistency. Dan Caldwell has suggested that

Nixon and Kissinger failed to relate détente to important American beliefs and

values.645 Stretched by the changes in ideological discourse on both the Left and

Right during the 1960s, détente ultimately became too broad in its meaning. For a

nation steeped in anti-Communism for twenty-five years, détente was a radical

change for some on the Right but not radical enough for many on the Left.

Critics of the policy of détente had two advantages that had been denied to critics

of previous administrations’ Cold War policies. First, their arguments touched a

debate started by Bell and Galbraith about the nature of American ideology.

Second, the challenge to executive dominance initiated by liberals had led to the

revival of Congress as a power centre from which it was possible to campaign

against administration policy. Critics of détente had both incentive and

opportunity to mobilise opposition against the Nixon–Kissinger policy. In

addition, events (particularly Watergate) undermined the power and prestige of

the presidency and facilitated the challenge to détente.

Since 1976 the neoconservative Committee on the Present Danger, composed of a

group of dissident national-security managers, had successfully equated

opposition to SALT 2 with opposition to the Carter administration and the

645 Dan Caldwell, American–Soviet Relations: From 1947 to the Nixon–Kissinger Grand Design (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 98.

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remnants of détente.646 In her much-noted 1979 essay “Dictators and Double

Standards,” Committee member Jeane Kirkpatrick asserted that liberals such as

Carter had no monopoly on morality or idealism. She stated: “Liberal idealism

need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the

defence of freedom and the national interests.”647 The Committee is often said to

have been a breeding ground for neoconservatism,648 but Kirkpatrick’s rhetoric

harked back to earlier tropes of containment and an older discourse of U.S.

exceptionalism.649

Carter’s foreign policy – especially détente – collapsed during the final days of

1979. In response to revolutionary turbulence in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union

invaded Afghanistan and installed a puppet government. Détente’s opponents

charged Carter, as well as Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger before him, with naiveté,

and as a result Carter lurched to the Right. The Carter Doctrine would later

declare that if the Soviets went beyond Afghanistan toward the Persian Gulf the

United States would use military force against them.650 Up to that point, no Cold

War doctrine had explicitly threatened war against the Soviets. The Carter

Doctrine would mark détente’s collapse into complete self-contradiction and

incoherence.

Ronald Reagan, who defeated Carter in the 1980 presidential election, sealed

détente’s fate as an overt policy and system of beliefs about the international

system. In part, this was based on the following rhetoric of the Committee on the

Present Danger:

The two superpowers have utterly opposing conceptions of world order. The United States, true to its traditions and ideals, sees a world moving toward peaceful unity and cooperation within a regime of law. The Soviet Union, for ideological as well as geopolitical reasons, sees a world riven by conflict and destined to be ruled exclusively by Marxism–Leninism. . . . The Soviet Union, driven both by deep-

646 Del Pero, The Eccentric Realist, 127–8. 647 Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” Commentary (November 1979), http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/dictatorships-double-standards/ [accessed 20/03/11]. 648 Del Pero, The Eccentric Realist, 128. 649 In fact the CPD was composed of a broader coalition than just neoconservatives. See Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 149. 650 Jimmy Carter, “State of the Union Address 1980” (23 January 1980), http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/documents/speeches/su80jec.phtml [accessed 20/03/11].

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rooted Russian imperial impulses and by Communist ideology, insists on pursuing an expansionist course. In its endless, probing quest, it attempts to take advantage of every opportunity to enlarge its influence. And military strength is more than ever the foundation for its underlying policy.651

It recalled the Manichean rhetoric of the 1950s. The Committee’s

recommendation to pursue ‘peace through strength’ was based on the assumption

that the United States had significant influence over Soviet policy and that the

Soviets’ defence efforts reflected a view of the United States as weak. According

to Eugene Rostow, Reagan’s first director of the Arms Control and Disarmament

Agency, détente was not “a reality but an aspiration,” a “figment of political

imagination.”652

Critics of détente accused advocates of arms control of blurring means and ends

and losing sight of the framework in which agreements were negotiated. Pursuing

arms control for its own sake obscured the fact that the U.S.–Soviet relationship

was still fundamentally competitive. The attack on arms control was part of a

larger critique of the “decade of neglect”653 associated with détente. According to

this critique, during the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, and Carter the United States

had failed to compete militarily with the Soviets and to cultivate a consensus as to

the appropriate U.S. role in world affairs. Critics of détente contended that

Americans had a tendency, in light of the Vietnam War, to equate U.S. power

with evil and to see the quest for influence abroad as inherently wrong.654

Conclusion

Critics of détente urged the United States to address its military, economic, and

political weaknesses and deal with the Soviet Union from a position of strength.

They wanted Americans to demonstrate to the Soviets that the United States was

prepared to pursue unilaterally what it could not achieve in negotiations.

Deterrence, not diplomacy, would ensure security. Strength, not summits, would

bring peace. 651 Eugene Rostow, “Peace with Freedom,” in Alerting America: The Papers of the Committee on the Present Danger ed. Charles Tyroler (Washington, D.C.: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1984), 40. 652 Ibid. 653 Anne H. Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 67–8. 654 W. Scott Thompson and Kenneth L. Adelman, National Security in the 1980s: From Weakness to Strength (San Francisco, Calif.: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1980), 5.

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This chapter argues that détente emerged in the context of profound domestic

disenchantment with the ideological status quo in America. Nixon and Kissinger

had hoped to manage the domestic backlash to the Vietnam War and address

some of the ideological challenges from both the Left and the Right that had

challenged the old foreign-policy consensus.655

As this chapter has demonstrated, the result was that, throughout its turbulent

history, détente exhibited a tension between the goal of transforming aspects of

the Soviet Union (effectively a continuation of containment) and the goal of

perpetuating U.S.–Soviet coexistence.656 Although this grand strategy was

ideologically innovative it not only failed to situate itself within the conventions

of American exceptionalism but was also overt in its attempts to stress its own

lack of ideology. In other words, détente was ideologically incoherent and was

never able to explain the connections between issues, the hierarchy of interests,

and the link between means and ends. As a result it was impossible to achieve

solid public support for détente, in part because Nixon, Kissinger, and Carter

conveyed contradictory messages about the meaning of the term détente and its

strategic objectives, and ultimately this tension would prove unsustainable.

655 Del Pero, The Eccentric Realist, 149. 656 Froman, The Development of the Idea of Détente, 118.

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Chapter 6. Bill Clinton, ‘The New World Order’, and the Strategy of

‘Engagement and Enlargement’

For over forty years the Cold War was the primary organising principle of U.S.

grand strategy. As demonstrated in Chapters 4 and 5, the discourse of U.S.

exceptionalism was a powerful ideological and lexical constraint on the Cold War

period’s two most noteworthy strategic policies, containment and détente. This

chapter will examine the contested meaning of U.S. exceptionalism in the ‘new

world order’ in the 1990s and the effect of that struggle on U.S. grand strategy in

the period bookmarked by the end of the Cold War and the attacks on the United

States on 11 September 2001. This period has been subject to a particular kind of

proleptic reading which has discounted the presidencies of George H. W. Bush

and Bill Clinton as a simple interregnum between the end of the Cold War and the

tumultuous – in terms of grand strategy – presidency of George W. Bush.657

Viewing this period in such a way suggests that the Clinton presidency was a

period without significant ideological contest – in the words of Jeremy Suri, “the

absence of effective grand strategy in the 1990s contributed to the crises of the

early twenty-first century.”658 Instead, this chapter seeks to recreate the debate

about America’s role in the world after the Cold War. In 1989 Francis Fukuyama

suggested that ideological contest and therefore the march of history had

effectively resolved itself.659 For Fukuyama Western-style democracy and

657 Gramsci defined an “interregnum” as a period in which the old form of rule was dying but a new one had not yet been born. See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 276. The term as used here is taken from Mary Kaldor. She used it to refer to the 1990s as “an interregnum between global conflicts when utopian ideas . . . . . .seemed possible”: Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 149. It was picked up by Martin Jacques, who made the link between Kaldor’s usage and American grand strategy: Martin Jacques, “The Interregnum,” London Review of Books, 5 February 2004, 8–9. See the following for studies which view the 1990s as an interregnum in terms of U.S. grand strategy: John Dumbrell, Clinton’s Foreign Policy: Between the Bushes, 1992–2000 (London; New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2009); Jeremi Suri, “American Grand Strategy from the Cold War’s End to 9/11,” Orbis, 53, no. 4 (2009): 611–27; Richard A. Melanson, American Foreign Policy since the Vietnam War: The Search for Consensus from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, 4th edn. (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2005), 36; Christian Reus-Smit, American Power and World Order, Themes for the 21st Century (Cambridge; Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2004), 27. Charles Krauthammer, writing from a different political perspective, called the 1990s a “holiday from history”: Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment Revisited,” The National Interest (2002), 5–17. 658 Suri, “American Grand Strategy,” 611. 659 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest (Summer 1989), 3–18. Later expanded in Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).

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capitalism were ascendant, but neither his original essay nor the expanded book

provided a vision of what America’s role in the world should be now that it had

reached such a triumphant ideological position.660 Fukuyama was in fact a

supporter of American “primacy.”661 However, during the 1990s, whilst “The End

of History” was widely cited, it was also widely misinterpreted (seventeen years

after the essay was written Fukuyama claimed that it had also been misinterpreted

by fellow neoconservatives).662 Robert Kagan summarised what was perhaps the

most important misinterpretation of Fukuyama – indeed, what he characterised as

the mistake of that era: “The mistake of the 1990s was the hope that democracy

was inevitable.”663 In other words, after the Cold War, “If the triumph of

democracy was a fait accompli, what role did America have in consolidating its

advance?”664 This chapter is an attempt to partially reconstruct that debate and see

how Clinton tailored his vision of American exceptionalism to create and justify a

grand strategy that articulated a role for America in the post-Cold War world.

President Clinton was the first U.S. president to enter office without the burden of

a strategic environment dominated by the Cold War. No other modern U.S.

president inherited a stronger, safer international position. The major threats that

had haunted U.S. policy for nearly fifty years had either disappeared or were

rapidly receding, leaving the United States the sole superpower. In 1992 the most 660 See Danny Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy: A Critical Analysis (London: Routledge, 2011), 88–90. 661 There were a wide range of figures in favour of the grand strategy characterized in the mid-1990s as “primacy”: see B. R. Posen and A. L. Ross, “Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy,” International Security 21, no. 3 (1997): 32–44. One grouping was Dick Cheney and his coterie of neoconservative advisors who wrote Defense Planning Guidance. The original document has only recently been declassified but is still so heavily redacted that it needs to be augmented by contemporaneous newspaper reports, themselves based on leaked documents. See U.S. Department of Defense “Defense Planning Guidance, FY 1994–1999” (18 February 1992), http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/doc03_full.pdf [accessed 08/09/11]. See also Joshua Muravchik, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1991); Joshua Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1996). There were differing conceptions of why primacy mattered in Samuel P. Huntington, “The U.S. – Decline or Renewal?” Foreign Affairs, 67 (1988): 76–96; Samuel P. Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters,” International Security, 17, no. 4 (1993): 68–83; William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, 75, no. 4 (1996): 18–32; James Kurth, “America’s Grand Strategy: A Pattern of History,” The National Interest (1996), 3–19. 662 It was only at the point of his public spilt with neoconservatism in 2006 that Fukuyama conveniently clarified the ambiguity inherent in the The End of History by suggesting that he intended his analysis to be descriptive of the ideologies of ‘modernity’ and not universally prescriptive. See Francis Fukuyama, After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, 2006), 53–5. 663 Robert Kagan, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (New York: Knopf, 2008), 99. 664 Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy, 89.

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seemingly intractable problems facing the U.S. were domestic, and Clinton’s first

presidential campaign reflected his lack of interest and experience in foreign

affairs. Clinton’s predecessor, George H. W. Bush, had been perceived as both

prioritising foreign affairs over domestic affairs and having been ‘punished’ by

voters for being out of touch with domestic affairs. Clinton’s grand strategy

presents an interesting case because the end of the Cold War could have been

expected to result in significant changes to the prevailing normative vocabulary of

U.S. grand strategy.

When the Cold War ended the United States was presented with an unprecedented

opportunity to recast its grand strategy. Two years after the collapse of the Soviet

Union President Clinton captured something of the optimism of the moment in a

speech to the UN General Assembly in 1993:

It is clear that we live at a turning point in human history. Immense and promising changes seem to wash over us every day. The cold war is over. The world is no longer divided into two armed and angry camps. Dozens of new democracies have been born. It is a moment of miracles.665

However, this rhetorical optimism was accompanied by the considerable

challenge of redefining America’s strategic priorities, not to mention a more

profound sense of her identity in an international environment which had radically

changed. The United States had been victorious in the sense that the end of the

Cold War had bought much of the world into alignment with her ideological

orientation, but at the same time she was faced with a lack of purpose. It was by

no means clear to what end her considerable resources would now be directed.

Paul Kennedy suggested in 1993 that “the relief that the Soviet Union is no longer

an ‘enemy’ is overshadowed by uncertainties about the United States’ proper

world role.”666 Ronald Asmus probed the irony of the situation further:

The paradoxical impact of the end of the Cold War is that it simultaneously vindicated American purpose and past policies and forced a rethinking of the assumptions that guided U.S. foreign policy

665 William J. Clinton, “Remarks to the 48th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City” (27 September 1993), www.presidency.ucsb.edu http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=47119&st=&st1=#ixzz1c0aq0qF8 [accessed 15/08/11]. 666 Paul M. Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1993), 293.

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for nearly half a century. While liberating the United States from its overriding concern with the Soviet threat, the end of the Cold War also compelled Americans to again confront core issues concerning definitions of our national interests and our role in the world.667

Many assessments of Clinton’s foreign policy have accentuated his

administration’s sacrifice of policy coherence to the needs of competing domestic

agendas.668 As William Hyland put it, “In the absence of an overall perspective,

most issues were bound to degenerate into tactical manipulations, some successful

some not.”669 This chapter is not intended to add to the scorecard assessments of

the perceived success or failure of Clinton’s grand strategy. Instead, it will

examine both persistence and change with respect to American ideological tropes,

in so far as they informed grand strategy during the post-Cold War period,

especially during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were intellectually fertile periods for

prognosticators of grand strategy.670 The debate about American power and

strategy had gathered fresh momentum in the late 1980s as academics, politicians,

policy-makers, and public intellectuals entered the fray, even before the Berlin

Wall had fallen.671 As a result Clinton came to power in the midst of an

ideologically rich debate, from the economic and military decline of the United

States forecast by Paul Kennedy672 to the re-emergence of Daniel Bell,673 refuting

his 1975 declaration of the end of American exceptionalism.674 This was,

667 Ronald D. Asmus, The New U.S. Strategic Debate (Santa Monica, Calif.: Arroyo Center and Rand Corporation, 1993), ix. 668 See Wyn Q. Bowen and David H. Dunn, American Security Policy in the 1990s: Beyond Containment (Aldershot; Brookfield, Vt.: Dartmouth, 1996); Dumbrell, Clinton’s Foreign Policy; P. Edward Haley, Strategies of Dominance: The Misdirection of U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Md.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Posen and Ross “Competing Visions.” 669 William G. Hyland, Clinton’s World: Remaking American Foreign Policy (Westport, Conn.; London: Praeger, 1999), 203. 670 This chapter will engage in more detail with a number of thinkers who presented very different visions of the international environment and America’s place within it. 671 See Kenneth S. Zagacki, “The Rhetoric of American Decline: Paul Kennedy, Conservatives, and the Solvency Debate,” Western Journal of Communication, 56, no. 4 (1992): 372–93, for an assessment of the importance of Kennedy’s contribution to political and intellectual debate in the U.S. 672 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Random House, 1987); Paul M. Kennedy, “The (Relative) Decline of America,” Atlantic Monthly (August 1987), 29–38. 673 Daniel Bell, “‘American Exceptionalism’ Revisited: The Role of Civil Society,” The Public Interest, no. 95 (1989): 38–56. 674 Daniel Bell, “The End of American Exceptionalism,” The Public Interest, no. 71 (1975): 193–224.

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however, a debate about more than just American grand strategy and the re-

emergence of prophets of U.S. decline. It was concerned with what John Lewis

Gaddis would characterise as the “geology” of the international system, the

“tectonic” shifts of history rather than the surface events of geopolitics. Even if

many commentators agreed that the events occurring at the end of the twentieth

century constituted a fundamental transformation, their conceptions of the new

world were at considerable variance. Francis Fukuyama’s vision was a world in

which ideological struggle was coming to an end, the “end of history” in his

grandiose conception,675 and with it the emergence of the possibility of perpetual

peace among liberal democracies.676 It was a picture that contrasted dramatically

with Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisations,”677 which was a much more

pessimistic (and is still a controversial) vision of a fragmented world, premised on

Western decline and exhorting the necessary abandonment of Western universalist

pretensions.678

This chapter will focus primarily on Clinton’s strategy of “engagement and

enlargement”679 and is intended to elucidate the ways in which his administration

envisaged “the new world order”680 and America’s place within it. Like previous

chapters, it will employ a form of Cambridge School contextualism that involves

five analytical steps.

675 Fukuyama, The End of History. 676 In this view Fukuyama was echoed by John E. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989) and Bruce M. Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton, N.J.; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1993). 677 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, 72, no. 3 (1993): 22–49; Samuel P. Huntington, “If Not Civilizations, What? Paradigms of the Post-Cold War,” Foreign Affairs, 72, no. 5 (1993): 186–94; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 678 Jacinta O’Hagan, “A ‘Clash of Civilizations’?” in Contending Images of World Politics, ed. Greg Fry and Jacinta O’Hagan (London: Macmillan, 2000), 135–7. 679 Originally articulated in Anthony Lake, “From Containment to Enlargement” (21 September 1993), http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/lakedoc.html [accessed 15/08/11], then codified in the administration’s National Security Strategy, White House, “A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 1994), http://osdhistory.defense.gov/docs/nss1994.pdf [accessed 14/08/11]. 680 An extended examination of the concept of ‘new world order’ as an animating utopian vision for Anglo-American politicians can be found in Andrew J. Williams, Failed Imagination? The Anglo-American New World Order from Wilson to Bush (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

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Step one of contextual analysis: the ideological context of the Clinton

presidency

The first step of Skinnerian contextual analysis addresses the question ‘In writing

a text, what was an author doing in relation to other available texts that made up

the ideological context?’ An ideology is a language of politics defined by its

conventions and employed by a number of writers. Methodologically, this

encompasses not only lexical choices but also principles, assumptions, and criteria

for testing knowledge-claims. This section will examine the strategy of

engagement and enlargement in terms of that strategy’s ideological context.

Specifically, it will explore the pronouncements of George H. W. Bush as well as

the post-Cold War debate about America’s place in the world. In short, this

section will examine the ideological context of the Clinton presidency.

In November 1990 George H. W. Bush declared that the Cold War was over. He

heralded a new era premised on a “new world order.”681 It was not immediately

clear what Bush meant by his concept. The speech emphasised several major

points: ‘order’, ‘peace’, ‘democracy’, and ‘free trade’. Some scholars have

suggested that international stability and the defeat of aggression were its only

real concerns.682 Despite these analyses, Bush was equally as concerned with

freedom and democracy:

Today is freedom’s moment . . . The possibility now exists for the creation of a true community of nations built on shared interests and ideals – a true community, a world where free governments and free markets meet the rising desire of the people to meet their own destiny.683

As the last section of the address stated emphatically, Bush’s objectives were

completed by a commitment to the creation of free markets and free trade.

681 George H. W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Cessation of the Persian Gulf Conflict” (6 March 1991), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=19364&st=&st1= – axzz1c0aSrMtk [accessed 15/08/11]. 682 See, for example, Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America’s Purpose (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1992); James Chace, The Consequences of the Peace: The New Internationalism and American Foreign Policy (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 683 George H. W. Bush, “Address to the 44th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, New York” (25 September 1989), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17559&st=44th+session&st1=#axzz1c0aSrMtk [accessed 15/08/11].

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Brent Scowcroft elaborated on Bush’s vision:

The Soviet Union was standing alongside us, not only in the United Nations, but also in condemning and taking action against Iraqi aggression . . . If the attack on Kuwait marked the end of forty-odd years of such superpower confrontation, what vistas might open up? The Security Council could then perform the role envisioned for it by the UN framers. The United States and the Soviet Union could, in most cases, stand together against unprovoked interstate aggression . . . From that point forward we tried to operate in a manner that would help establish a pattern for the future.684

It was a conception that might have evoked Walter Lippmann’s sympathies, based

as it was on multilateral cooperation but underpinned by American global

leadership. Scowcroft continued:

Our foundation was the premise that the United States henceforth would be obligated to lead the world community to an unprecedented degree, as demonstrated by the Iraqi crisis, and that we should attempt to pursue our national interests, wherever possible, within a framework of concert with our friends and the international community.685

Bush believed that the post-Cold War era was comparable to the periods

immediately after the two world wars. For the third time in a century, history

seemed to be at a crossroads from which the road map could be redrawn.686

The fluidity that had marked the two post-world-war periods had congealed into

an American consensus for isolationism in 1919–21 and for internationalism in

1945–7. In the early 1990s Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Ambassador to the UN (who

now formed part of a small group of neoconservatives who no longer advocated

democratic crusades after the Cold War),687 articulated the challenge: the

objective of foreign policy was to enable the United States to become a “normal

country in normal times.”688

684 George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf: distributed by Random House, 1998), 400. 685 Ibid. 686 John Gerard Ruggie, “Third Try at World Order? America and Multilateralism after the Cold War,” Political Science Quarterly, 109, no. 4 (1994): 553–70. 687 Jean-François Drolet, American Neoconservatism: The Politics and Culture of a Reactionary Idealism (London: Hurst, 2011), 143. 688 Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “A Normal Country in a Normal Time,” in America’s Purpose: New Visions of U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. Owen Harries (San Francisco, Calif.: ICS Press, 1991), 155.

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The issue at stake was precisely what ‘normalcy’ was supposed to look like. It

was clear that it wasn’t simply a case of ‘back to the future’, the return of great

power politics, as John Mearsheimer predicted.689 Bush faced a myriad of options.

Would the United States return to the 1920s and turn its back on the world’s

troubles? More plausibly, would it return to the 1940s and make fresh

international commitments? If the United States was the only remaining

superpower, how should it use its power? Would it reorder the world in its own

image? In October 1992 a TIME magazine editorial asked, “Is the U.S. in an

irreversible decline as the world’s premier power?”690 Paul Kennedy predicted

that U.S. power would significantly wane in the post-Cold War world.691 Former

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara urged immediate 50 per cent defence

cuts.692 For Kennedy the logical corollary was to reinvest the ‘peace dividend’ in

the American social and economic infrastructure and in so doing tackle the reality

of decline.693

James Chace urged a responsible ‘new internationalism’ rooted in international

economic and financial institutions designed to safeguard the dollar and global

free trade.694 His voice was joined by those who called variously for American

leaders to promote international democracy, maximise world order (with the U.S.

acting as international policeman, to resurrect Carter’s ‘global community’ ideas

of his early presidency), or defend Western culture and values against new

nationalisms and revived Islam.695

689 John J. Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War,” International Security, 15, no. 1 (1990): 5–56; John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 2001). 690 ‘Editorial’, TIME, 15 October 1992. 691 Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers; Fraser Cameron, U.S. Foreign Policy after the Cold War: Global Hegemon or Reluctant Sheriff? (London; New York: Routledge, 2002). 692 Robert S. McNamara, Out of the Cold: New Thinking for American Foreign and Defense Policy in the 21st Century (New York; London: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 172. 693 Paul M. Kennedy, “Fin-De-Siecle America,” New York Review of Books, 28 June 1990, 31–40. 694 Chace, The Consequences of the Peace. 695 See Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, 70, no. 1 (1990/1991): 23–33; William G. Hyland, “America’s New Course,” Foreign Affairs, 69, no. 2 (1990): 1–12; John Lewis Gaddis, “Toward the Post-Cold War World,” Foreign Affairs, no. 70 (1991): 102–22; Ted Galen Carpenter, “The New World Disorder,” Foreign Policy, no. 84 (1991): 24–39; William S. Lind, “Defending Western Culture,” Foreign Policy, no. 84 (1991): 40–50; Larry Diamond, “Promoting Democracy,” Foreign Policy, no. 87 (1992): 25–46.

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Bush administration officials were aware of the opportunity they had to recast

American foreign policy and their response was the concept of the new world

order, outlined to Congress during the 1990s Gulf War:

We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment . . . Out of these troubled times . . . a new world order can emerge . . . Today, that new world order is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we have known, a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice, a world where the strong respect the weak.696

The Gulf War allowed the new world order concept to be developed and executed.

Prior to the conflict Bush had certainly used similar language, suggesting that it

was time to move “beyond containment to a new policy for the 1990s”697 and that

Washington’s aim was “ultimately to welcome the Soviet Union back into the

world order”;698 he referred to an “extraordinary new world,”699 but his language

at that point was ambiguous and was not attached to an explicit broader vision of

what that “extraordinary new world” should look like. Bush coined his use of the

term during an August fishing trip with Brent Scowcroft where they discussed the

unfolding Gulf crisis.700 Bush’s 11 September address to Congress did give his

vision greater coherence but it was not until a year later at the United Nations that

Bush laid out the specific goals of the new world order. It would, he said, be

“characterized by the rule of law rather than the resort to force, the cooperative

settlement of disputes rather than anarchy and bloodshed, and an unstinting belief

in human rights”.701

696 George H. W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Persian Gulf Crisis and the Federal Budget Deficit” (11 September 1990), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=18820&st=&st1=#axzz1nlKZtQcP [accessed 15/08/11]. 697 George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at the Texas A&M University Commencement Ceremony in College Station” (12 May 1989), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17022&st=&st1=#axzz1nlKZtQcP [accessed 15/08/11]. 698 Ibid. 699 George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at a Fundraising Dinner for Senatorial Candidate Larry Craig in Boise, Idaho” (19 July 1990), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=18691&st=extraordinary+new+world&st1=#axzz1nlKZtQcP [accessed 15/08/11]. 700 Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 353–5, 400. 701 George H. W. Bush, “Address to the 46th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City” (23 September 1991),

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However, in Europe, as elsewhere, the United States was still the linchpin in a

security system resting on U.S. treaty commitments to defend America’s Atlantic

allies. On both sides of the Atlantic there was little sentiment in favour of

complete U.S. disengagement. Bush’s rhetoric reflected continued American

hegemony far more than his new world order concept suggested. In the Iraq war

America had acted with an international coalition and with the blessing of the UN,

but it seemed that the administration was willing to act unilaterally if the coalition

or UN objected. So, whilst the new world order contained some echoes of

Woodrow Wilson, it was certainly not a crusade for global democracy or renewed

multilateralism. Instead it represented an adaptation of Pax Americana to a world

in which America had to recognise that it did not have undisputed sway.702 Bush

did suggest that the UN would be the forum for the development and maintenance

of the new world order, that it would “offer friendship and leadership” whilst

establishing “a Pax Universalis built upon shared responsibility and

aspirations.”703 Yet in his 1991 State of the Union Address it was very clear that

Bush’s new world order would be dominated and defined by the U.S. His speech

made clear that “American leadership is indispensable” and he reaffirmed

America’s manifest destiny:

[We] know why the hopes of humanity turn to us. We are Americans; we have a unique responsibility to do the hard work of freedom. And when we do, freedom works . . . If we can selflessly confront the evil for the sake of good in a land so far away, then surely we can make this land all that it should be. If anyone tells you that America’s best days are behind her, they’re looking the wrong way . . . We have within our reach the promise of a renewed America. We can find meaning and reward by serving some higher purpose than ourselves, a shining purpose, the illumination of a Thousand Points of Light.704

Bush’s conception of the new world order relied heavily on American leadership

and strength with the unmistakeable animating principle of missionary

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=20012&st=&st1=#axzz1nlKZtQcP [accessed 15/08/11]. 702 John Dumbrell , American Foreign Policy: Carter to Clinton (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 163. 703 Bush, “Address to the 46th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City”. 704 George H. W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union” (29 January 1991), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=19253&st=&st1=#axzz1nlKZtQcP [accessed 15/08/11].

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exceptionalism. Bush still assumed the universal applicability of traditional

American values:

I feel strongly about the role the United States should play in the new world before us. We have the political and economic influence and strength to pursue our own goals, but as the leading democracy and beacon of liberty, and given our blessings of freedom, of resources and of geography, we have a disproportionate responsibility to use that power in pursuit of common good. We also have an obligation to lead . . . The United States is mostly perceived as benign, without territorial ambitions, uncomfortable with exercising our considerable power.705

The U.S. was not going to cede power to the collective will of the UN but would

define its own priorities, preferably, but not necessarily, with the support of the

international community. As Bush and Scowcroft put it, “we opposed allowing

the UN to organize and run a war. It was important to reach out to the rest of the

world, but even more important to keep the strings of control tightly in our own

hands.”706

James Petras and Morris Morley described the new world order as an attempt to

recreate “a world of uncontested U.S. power, in the process of subordinating the

ambitions of competitor allies to American interest.”707 They were correct to pick

up the embodiment of themes from the early days of containment and

preponderant power. Bush was concerned, much like Truman, with countering

domestic isolationist threats708 and, whilst he favoured American hegemony,

preferably maintained multilaterally, he took a limited view of American security

interests.709 American primacy meant that the U.S. could prohibit state-to-state

705 Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 566. 706 Ibid., 491. 707 James F. Petras and Morris H. Morley, Empire or Republic? American Global Power and Domestic Decay (New York; London: Routledge, 1995), 21. 708 Neoisolationists seldom referred to themselves by such a term but nonetheless they were a number of prominent advocates. See Earl C. Ravenal, “The Case for Adjustment,” Foreign Policy, no. 81 (1990): 3–19; Patrick J. Buchanan, “America First and Second, and Third,” The National Interest (Spring 1990), 77–82; Doug Bandow, “Keeping the Troops and the Money at Home,” Current History, 93, no. 579 (1994): 8–13; Eric A. Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century (Princeton, N.J.; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1995). The Economist magazine suggested that by the mid-1990s one American party (probably the Democrats) would be “as committed to isolationism as American parties can be.” “You Can’t Go Home.” The Economist, September 28 1991, 15. President Bush assured the UN that America would not retreat into isolationism, see Bush, “Address to the 46th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.” 709 Even if it was not his preferred form of grand strategy, George H. W. Bush seemed to err towards what Christopher Layne called “minimal realism” (compared to “maximal realism,”

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aggression by rogue dictators, as had happened in the Gulf War (and in contrast to

the regime change of his son’s presidency). The Cold War lasted almost until the

end of the first Bush administration – he left office barely a year after Boris

Yeltsin dissolved the Soviet Union – and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the

administration thus carried the prudence of the Cold War into the new world, such

that it didn’t seem very new at all.

At the same time as the emergence of the new world order concept, at the

Department of Defense Dick Cheney ordered two teams to prepare studies of

post-Cold War American grand strategy.710 One team was headed by General

Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The other, the now notorious

‘Team B’, was headed by Paul Wolfowitz and included Lewis Libby and

Cheney’s chief of staff, Eric Edelman, who would become key figures in the next

Bush presidency. Cheney preferred the Team B version and the president was due

to make public at least some of the ideas at a major address in August 1990. The

plans were interrupted by the invasion of Kuwait and, overshadowed by these

events, the president’s speech attracted no unusual recognition.711

Cheney’s ‘Team B’ report finally came to light in 1992 as Defense Planning

Guidance for 1994–1999. It portrayed a very threatening international

environment and, in response, advocated the maintenance of Cold War levels of

military readiness. However, there was a paradox at the core of the report. On the

one hand it admitted that the United States “no longer faces either a global threat

or a hostile non-democratic power dominating a region critical to our interests,”712

while on the other it was hectoring in its insistence that the United States must

take up a new vital mission:

which equates with the “primacy” favoured by neoconservatives). See Christopher Layne, “Less Is More: Minimal Realism in East Asia,” The National Interest, 1996, 64–77. 710 This account of the genesis of what became known as the “five-twenty-one brief” is based on Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order,” The New Yorker, 1 April 2002; Jim Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York; London: Viking, 2004), 208–15; George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 12–15. 711 George H. W. Bush, “Remarks at the Aspen Institute Symposium in Aspen, Colorado” (2 August 1990), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=18731&st=&st1=#axzz1nlKZtQcP [accessed 15/08/11]. 712 Patrick Tyler, “Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: ‘Prevent the Emergence of a New Rival’,” New York Times, 8 March 1992, I1, I14.

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Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavour to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.713

In short, this would be a new world order based on “convincing potential

competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive

posture to protect their legitimate interests.”714 The United States would also have

to deal with regional conflicts and instability in a way that would encourage

democracy.715 Equally, the document suggested that the Bush administration’s ad

hoc coalition formed during the Gulf War represented the preferred ideal type of

limited multilateralism for the U.S. “ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond

the immediate crisis, and in many cases carrying only general agreement over the

objectives to be accomplished.”716 This aimed at outright hegemony for the U.S.

When it was leaked to The New York Times there was an outcry against an

apparently open-ended commitment to competition and coercion, especially as the

document indicated Germany and Japan amongst the most likely competitors.717

In the political turmoil Cheney and Wolfowitz distanced themselves from the

document. The revised version, Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional

Defense Strategy,718 no longer made such open-ended commitments to deter the

emergence of a rival power to the U.S. and removed Germany and Japan as

competitors. In its place was the broader task to “deter or defeat attack from

whatever source.”719 Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby believed that he had managed to

preserve the original draft’s emphasis on maintaining U.S. preponderance through

the use of euphemisms.720 This suggestion that the final, toned-down version

713 Ibid. 714 Ibid. 715 Patrick Tyler, “Pentagon Drops Goal of Blocking New Super-Powers,” New York Times, 24 May 1992, I1. 716 Tyler, “Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan.” 717 Ibid. 718 U.S. Department of Defense, “Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy” (January 1993), http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/naarpr_Defense.pdf [accessed 15/08/11]. 719 Ibid., 8. 720 Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 208–15.

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veiled firmer strategic commitments721 was affirmed by Wolfowitz, who

commented on the final draft: “What is published, while I admit some of the

corners are rounded off on it, reflects my views.”722

Both documents were underpinned by a strong belief in American exceptionalism

and by a return of the neoconservative critiques of détente, primarily that America

must resist the return of multipolarity and find a renewed ideological purpose.

Multipolarity was seen by these neoconservatives as the cause of uncontrollable

security dilemmas in the form of arms races. In other words, they turned the logic

of realism on its head, ascribing the idea of a global balance of power with

responsibility for a litany of offences. As the Regional Defense Strategy put it:

It is not in our interest or those of the other democracies to return to earlier periods in which multiple military powers balanced one against another in what passed for security structures, while regional, or even global peace hung in the balance. As in the past, such struggles might eventually force the United States at much higher cost to protect its interests and counter the potential developments of a new global threat.723

This was not simply a structural argument: it was an argument very specifically in

favour of American unipolarity. As Ben Wattenberg put it “A unipolar world is a

good thing, if America is the Uni.”724 The neoconservative ideological

commitment was expressed at the time by Joshua Muravchik, who called for

making the promotion of democracy the “centrepiece”725 of America’s post-Cold

War foreign policy, as he put it:

In both China and the Soviet Union the old structures are crumbling, and democracy is a possible outcome. For our nation, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. Our failure to exert every possible effort to secure this outcome would be unforgivable.726

Muravchik provided an element of linkage between the neoconservatives and

Clinton. Largely because of his disgust that President H. W. Bush did little to 721 Cheney suggested that the Bush administration did broadly agree with the principles laid out in the draft DPG document. See Dick Cheney, “Active Leadership? You Better Believe It,” New York Times, 15 March 1992, Section 4, 17. 722 Sam Tannenhaus, “Interview with Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz,” Vanity Fair (9 May 2003), http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2594 [accessed 15/08/11]. 723 U.S. Department of Defense. “Defense Strategy for the 1990s,” 8. 724 Ben J. Wattenberg, The First Universal Nation: Leading Indicators and Ideas About the Surge of America in the 1990s (New York; Oxford: Free Press; Maxwell Macmillan, 1991), 24. 725 Muravchik, Exporting Democracy, 221. 726 Ibid., 227.

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promote democracy in China and had chosen not to remove Saddam Hussein from

power Muravchik would go on to support Clinton727 and, indeed, helped him to

draft a foreign-policy address in 1992 (although he would ultimately become a

supporter of President George W. Bush). Although Clinton was not a

neoconservative he did share with them an overt emphasis on democracy

promotion. However, there was a significant ideological gulf between the

neoconservative vision of polyarchy and Clintontian democratic enlargement.728

The timing of the two Cheney-sponsored papers is important to emphasise

because the neoconservative grand strategy floated in Defense Policy Guidance

for 1994–1999 represented a possible policy direction in the early 1990s.729 The

first President Bush did not pursue such a far-reaching conception of American

grand strategy and unrestrained democracy promotion, even if elements of

American hegemony were present in his conception of the new world order.

Instead, as the first Bush presidency fizzled out the United States adopted a new

strategy based on the fear that the country might have to fight two regional wars

simultaneously – most probably in Korea and the Persian Gulf. The strategy

called for sequential engagement of the Korean and Gulf threats and was blurry

enough to satisfy both hawks and doves. In a move that reflected budgetary

constraints rather than visionary grand strategy, U.S. armed forces were reduced

to a “Base Force”.730

As events unfolded, the 1992 presidential election did not substantially engage

with the issue of foreign policy. The phrase drafted by Clinton’s campaign team –

“it’s the economy, stupid!”731 – was partially intended to turn his inexperience in

727 Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 80–82; Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy, 50. 728 This the thesis goes on to explore in the next chapter, the neoconservative understanding of democracy. 729 However, this was not the genesis of this brand of neoconservative grand strategy. Criticisms based upon very similar logic had been levelled at the policy of détente by neoconservatives in the 1970s. 730 Lorna S. Jaffe, The Development of the Base Force, 1989–1992 (Washington, D.C.: Joint History Office, Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1993). 731 The phrase was extremely widely used by the Clinton campaign and parodied by others. Its first use is hard to determine and may have preceded Clinton. Its origins seem to have been with Clinton’s campaign manager James Carville, who reportedly had the phrase written above his campaign desk. See Michael Kelley, “The 1992 Campaign: The Democrats – Clinton and Bush Compete to Be Champion of Change; Democrat Fights Perceptions of Bush Gain,” New York Times, 31 October 1992.

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foreign policy compared to the incumbent president to his advantage. It became

fashionable to mock Bush’s ‘new world order’, which critics called the “new

world disorder.”732 Some saw Bush’s vision as too timid, placing too much

emphasis on maintaining stability rather than promoting values.733 Leading

realists considered it premature to dismiss the perennial struggle for power,734

although Henry Kissinger acknowledged that the American public could not be

won over to policies based on an “apparent moral neutrality.”735 Kissinger argued

that centuries of the balance of power could not be brushed aside in favour of a

new system that defied definition.736

By Election Day in November 1992 there was no clear consensus regarding the

direction of foreign policy. As late as January 1993, as Clinton was replacing

Bush as president, Bush elaborated criteria for military intervention which still

favoured international engagement, albeit a more selective engagement which

recognised the constraints imposed by public opinion and limited resources.

Under those criteria military intervention could be pursued if:

the stakes warranted the use of force, force could be effective, no other policies were likely to prove effective, the application of force could be limited in scope and time, and the potential benefits justified the potential cost and sacrifice.737

According to H. W. Brands this represented the reality of the new world order:

that in fact the “1990s produced a crisis in American thinking about the world.”738

Likewise, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright also maintained that

732 Senator Ernest Hollings comments to Secretary of State James Baker at the Hearings of the Commerce, Justice and State Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee (12 June 1991), quoted in Human Rights Watch, “Human Rights Watch World Report 1992” (New York: 1 January 1992), 788. 733 Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “What Are the President’s Foreign Policy Goals?” Washington Post, 16 March 1992. 734 Joseph S. Nye, “What New World Order?” Foreign Affairs, 71, no. 2 (1992): 83–96. 735 Henry Kissinger, “False Dreams of New World Order,” Washington Post, 26 February 1992. 736 Ibid. 737 Michael Wines, “Bush, in West Point Valedictory, Offers Principles on Use of Force,” New York Times, 6 January 1993. 738 H. W. Brands, “Exemplary America Versus Interventionist America,” in At the End of the American Century: America’s Role in the Post-Cold War World, ed. Robert L. Hutchings (Baltimore, Md.; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 47.

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articulating America’s role for the 1990s was the fundamental problem that

Clinton faced throughout his presidency.739

A number of critics rushed to define this intellectual void. In the summer of 1989

Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History” appeared in the neoconservative

quarterly The National Interest.740 It sparked intense debate in Washington after

parts of the article appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, TIME

magazine, and a host of international publications.741 Fukuyama heralded the end

of the Cold War by declaring the victory of the liberal West over the Communist

East. He characterised the Cold War as an epic battle between two ideologies to

determine the direction of man’s evolution through the course of modernity. The

West’s victory was ‘the end of history’, at least history as understood as the

process of social and political evolution driven by a dialectical clash of ideologies.

After two centuries of violent competition, liberal democracy had triumphed over

hereditary monarchy, fascism and, ultimately, Communism. Furthering his

argument, Fukuyama suggested: “While earlier forms of government were

characterised by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual

collapse, liberal democracy was ultimately free from such fundamental internal

contradictions.”742

The victory of liberal democracy, which also encompassed the triumph of

capitalism, was, in part, based upon the innate human thymotic743 struggle for

recognition, which Fukuyama asserted only liberal democracy could satisfy.744

This was a thesis that melded easily with American exceptionalism, where

America was the liberal democracy par excellence and the beacon for universal

thymotic expression.745 Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to characterise

Fukuyama as an uncritical cheerleader. In his original article he suggested that the

739 Madeleine Albright quoted in Douglas Brinkley, “Democratic Enlargement: The Clinton Doctrine,” Foreign Policy, no. 106 (1997): 121. 740 Fukuyama, “The End of History?” 741 Torbjørn L. Knutsen, “Answered Prayers: Fukuyama, Liberalism and the End-of-History Debate,” Security Dialogue, 22, no. 1 (1991): 77. 742 Fukuyama, The End of History, xi. 743 The greek term thymos had originally been associated with the quest for empire and glory but Fukuyama associated its usage with human dignity and human rights: ibid., 162–91. 744 Fukuyama, The End of History, xi–xxiii. 745 William V. Spanos, America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xviii.

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“common marketization” of the world would not lead to the universal realisation

of thymos but rather its suppression:

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition . . . will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems . . . I can feel in myself and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.746

Despite his own sense of nostalgia for ‘history’, an underappreciated nuance to his

writing, Fukuyama’s work served to offer support for a conception of history

which was embedded in Western, and especially American, culture. In that sense

his argument was illustrative of a trend of American optimism prevalent in the

late 1980s747 that contrasted with the ‘declinist’ trend of the 1970s to the mid-

1980s which had been spurred by the Vietnam War, the oil crisis of 1973 and the

trade deficit with Japan.748 His original article was prescient in both expressing

the American sense of triumph and acting as a guide, or so it appeared, to the

radical global changes occurring.749

Fukuyama’s extension of his original essay in 1992 endorsed a number of

important intellectual concepts which became “the lingua franca of contemporary

international relations.”750 Fukuyama was important because he sought to define

what liberalism stood for in the absence of its Communist antithesis.751 Fukuyama

suggested that the world would be divided into an expanding ‘post-historical’

realm of liberal democracies and a contracting ‘historical’ realm of authoritarian

states, almost exclusively in the developing world. This is a recognisable form of

the democratic peace, the claim that liberal democracies do not go to war against

one another, and thus a liberal democratic world would be a peaceful one.752 This

746 Fukuyama, “The End of History?” 18. 747 See also John Lukacs, The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993). 748 Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was an influential text but by no means isolated; see Huntington, “The U.S. – Decline or Renewal?”, for a comprehensive analysis of declinist writing in the late 1980s. For a later appraisal of declinist writing see Bruce Cumings, “Still the American Century,” Review of International Studies, 25, no. 5 (1999): 271–99. 749 See Bruce Cumings,”The End of History or the Return of Liberal Crisis?” Current History, 98, no. 624 (1999): 9–16. 750 James L. Richardson, “The ‘End of History’?” in Contending Images of World Politics, ed. Greg Fry and Jacinta O’Hagan (London: Macmillan, 2000), 21. 751 Gregory Bruce Smith, “The ‘End of History’ or a Portal to the Future: Does Anything Lie Beyond Late Modernity?” in After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics, ed. Timothy Burns (Lanham, Md.; London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 2. 752 Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace.

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was an image of a prevailing international order as Washington wished it to

appear: essentially benign, so long as the American model continued to win

greater acceptance. The merging of ‘the end of history’ with the democratic peace

allowed a distinctive ordering of the world split between a liberal core, the zone of

democratic peace, and a violent Hobbesian periphery “mired in history.”753 Those

who did not conform with the prevailing norms were presented as culturally and

historically backward, without norms worthy of preservation. In the main these

zones would “maintain parallel but separate existences,”754 but in this world

intervention by liberal democracies was justified both in terms of maintaining

order but more in terms of dealing with widespread human rights violations. In

practice, this type of intervention would ultimately be selective.755

Rekindling long-neglected Wilsonian strands, the Clinton administration would

use such thinking to justify its policy principle that, to preserve world peace,

democracy had to be promoted.756 The reasoning was clear: “By promoting

democracy abroad, the United States can help bring into being for the first time in

history a world composed mainly of stable democracies.”757 Others were less

optimistic. Robert Kaplan saw the post-Cold War arena as the setting for “coming

anarchy.”758 He envisioned a future in which small nations would break down

amid dysfunctional environments. The global environment would create

numerous problems, including ethnic, religious, and tribal conflicts such as those

that occurred in Sierra Leone (which inspired him to write the article), Rwanda,

Somalia, and Bosnia. For Kaplan, the threat of anarchy posed problems to the

great powers and international institutions.759 What was the case in West Africa at

the time of writing would, in Kaplan’s view, spread further as environmental

problems generated migration and this, in turn, would become a principal national

security issue for the United States in the next century. His rhetorically powerful

753 Fukuyama, “The End of History?” 15. 754 Fukuyama, The End of History, 276. 755 Richardson, “The ‘End of History’?” 25. 756 William J. Clinton, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union” (25 January 1994), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=50409&st=&st1=#axzz1oKmKx8a0 [accessed 15/08/11]. 757 Diamond, “Promoting Democracy,” 26. 758 Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic Monthly (February 1994), 44–76. 759 Ibid.

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analysis of neo-Malthusian themes paralleled U.S. media coverage of Africa at the

time.760

Samuel Huntington shared Kaplan’s pessimistic view of the post-Cold War world;

he rejected Fukuyama’s assumptions of universality and invoked a sense of the

‘West’ as being in decline and in need of defence. However, he argued that the

world was headed not toward anarchy but toward a ‘clash of civilisations’,

amongst the Western, Sinic, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin-

American and “possibly African.” Societies. For Huntington the end of the Cold

War signalled the collapse of ideological identification as a central feature of

international relations. As technology weakened the role of the nation-state as a

political community and enhanced cultural and religious identity, Huntington

believed that both the cohesion within and the tension between civilisational

groups would increase.761 The main conflicts Huntington forecast were those on

‘Fault-lines’ between civilisations.762 Although he did acknowledge the potential

for conflict within civilisations, he made the assumption that these would be less

intense and less likely to spread.763

Whereas Fukuyama envisioned a post-Cold War world of integration, Kaplan and

Huntington predicted disintegration.764 Huntington’s suggested response was for

the West to abandon any notion of embodying universal values and focus instead

on cohesion, protecting its own interests and restraining itself from undue

interference in other civilisations. In other words, unlike Fukuyama, Huntington

was both descriptive and prescriptive. In the context of American grand strategy

Huntington made the observation that the United States has always defined itself

in antithesis to someone; in the post-Cold War environment he therefore asked

“How will we know who we are if we don’t know who we are against?”765

Equally, he suggested that a certain degree of world order would be maintained by

“Core-states” within civilisations. These were the most powerful and culturally

760 G. Myers et al., “The Inscription of Difference: News Coverage of the Conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia,” Political geography, 15, no. 1 (1996): 21–46. 761 Ibid. 762 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 252–4. 763 Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” 38. 764 Ibid., 49. 765 Ibid., 37.

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central states within a civilisation and it is a description very reminiscent of great

powers within a classical realist analysis.766

Writing in the middle of Clinton’s presidency, John Ikenberry contended that

views such as Kaplan’s and Huntington’s were off the mark. For Ikenberry the

common assumption that the international environment would disintegrate after

the Soviet Union’s collapse was fundamentally wrong. In his view, the world

order created after the Second World War was thriving in the form of

international organisations created in the 1940s, such as the UN, the International

Monetary Fund, the World Bank, NATO, and the General Agreement on Tariffs

and Trade (GATT). According to Ikenberry, this world order was more robust

than during its Cold War years767 and thus his argument seemed to support an

inexorable movement towards Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ and to repudiate

Huntington.768

Though the Clinton administration were by no means wholehearted in their

support for Fukuyama – they seem to have avoided using his ‘End of History’

phrasing – they did seem to accept his core argument that they were living

through a period that left “the ideal of democracy – if not always its practice – as

the sole surviving form of government.”769

Step two of contextual analysis: Clinton’s ideological manoeuvre as a

political manoeuvre

Step two of Skinnerian contextual analysis addresses the question ‘In producing a

text, what was the author doing in relation to available and problematic political

action that made up the practical context?’ In this section, the analysis will focus

on Clinton’s ideological manoeuvre as a political manoeuvre. The section will

place the strategy of engagement and enlargement within its practical political

context (i.e., the political activity that authors addressed and to which the strategy

responded).

766 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 156. 767 G. John Ikenberry, “The Myth of Post-Cold War Chaos” Foreign Affairs, 75 (1996): 79–91. 768 Ibid. 769 Michael Cox, 1999, “The Clinton Administration as New Wilsonians,” (paper presented at ‘Power and Ethics in International Politics’ conference, April 29-30 1999, London), 9.

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Bill Clinton had defeated George H. W. Bush in the 1992 presidential election

largely by focusing on the nation’s troubled domestic agenda. Clinton’s campaign

had gone further; by focusing on domestic economic renewal they had managed

to make Bush’s foreign-policy strength into a weakness as he was forced to

engage with domestic policy. Despite this, Governor Clinton’s campaign foreign-

policy speeches had been hard to separate conceptually from those of his

opponent.

During the campaign two speeches in particular, the “New Covenant for National

Security” speech and his speech to the Foreign Policy Association, codified

Clinton’s foreign-policy position. It was his “New Covenant for National

Security”770 speech which first laid out his position on foreign affairs and

suggested a necessity to transcend the barrier between foreign and domestic

policies. In April 1992 his speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York

began to assert some of the concerns which would preoccupy his presidency.

Most importantly, he prioritised assistance to newly independent states with the

strident exceptionalist call to action: “History is calling upon our nation to decide

anew whether we will lead or defer; whether we will engage or abstain; whether

we will shape a new era or instead be shaped by it.”771 He suggested that Bush

had failed to “offer a compelling rationale for America’s continued engagement in

the world.”772 Nonetheless it was apparent to commentators at the time that there

was little space between the foreign policy of the president and his opponent.773

During the debate with Bush in St Louis, Clinton outlined his version of the

‘democratic peace’. “We ought to be promoting democratic impulses around the

world. Democracies are our partners. They don’t go to war with each other.”774 In

the speech Clinton attacked his rival for his timidity in the face of the Tiananmen

770 William J. Clinton, “A New Covenant for American Security: Remarks to Students at Georgetown University” (12 December 1991), http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=128&subid=174&contentid=250537 [accessed 15/08/11]. 771 William J. Clinton, “Speech to the Foreign Policy Association” (1 April 1992) in “President-Elect Clinton’s Foreign Policy Statements December 12, 1991–November 4, 1992.” Foreign Policy Bulletin, 3, no. 3 (1992): 12. 772 Ibid., 9. 773 Thomas L. Friedman, “The 1992 Campaign: Foreign Policy; Turning His Sights Overseas, Clinton Sees a Problem at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” New York Times, 2 April 1992. 774 William J. Clinton, “Presidential Debate in St Louis” (11 October 1992), http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php id=4947&year=1992&month=10 [accessed 15/08/11].

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Square massacre and also promised to consider lifting the arms embargo on

Bosnian Muslims. He noted that the U.S. “can’t get involved in the quagmire of

Bosnia.”775

When Clinton entered office there were more U.S. troops deployed in more

nations than had been the case for any new commander in chief since Truman. As

of January 1993 U.S. Marines were in Somalia, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard

had undertaken a quarantine of Haiti, and the U.S. Air Force had just bombed

radar stations in Iraq and was preparing for an airlift to Bosnia.

Clinton argued that, for the first time in his lifetime, it was consistently possible to

advocate freedom, democracy, and human rights. His inaugural address described

his concept of the new world order:

Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom. . . . Our hopes, our hearts and our hands are with those on every continent who are building democracy and freedom. Their cause is America’s cause.776

This reflected stronger internationalism than had been present in Clinton’s

campaign pronouncements. Like John F. Kennedy’s pronouncements, which had

a similar ring, Clinton’s pronouncements were not easy to translate into policies.

It was not clear at what risk and price Clinton would champion democracy.

Clinton’s foreign-policy inclinations were extremely cautious; he was not

prepared to sacrifice his presidency on the alter of idealism.777 In the first eight

months of his presidency he made only four major foreign-policy speeches and all

of them stressed continuity with his predecessor.778 All of these speeches stressed

775 Ibid. 776 William J. Clinton, “Inaugural Address” (20 January 1993), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=46366#axzz1oKmKx8a0 [accessed 15/08/11]. 777 Michael Cox, “Democracy Promotion under Clinton,” in American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts, ed. Michael Cox, G. John Ikenberry, and Takashi Inoguchi (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 223. 778 See William J. Clinton, “Remarks at the American University Centennial Celebration” (26 February 1993), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=46220&st=&st1=#axzz1oPnzaRQU [accessed 15/08/11]; William J. Clinton, “Remarks to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Annapolis” (1 April 1993), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=46392&st=&st1=#axzz1oPnzaRQU [accessed 15/08/11]; William J. Clinton, “Remarks to the Crew of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt” (12 March 1993), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=46330#axzz1oPnzaRQU [accessed 15/08/11]; William J. Clinton, “Remarks at the United States Military Academy

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Clinton’s commitment to multilateralism and a desire to pursue policies that

stabilised the fractured international environment.

The president received considerable criticism from House Republicans that

summer for over-reliance on the UN in Somalia, lack of action in Haiti, and a

mercurial Bosnian policy. As Brent Scowcroft suggested, Clinton was pursuing a

“peripatetic foreign policy at prey to the whims of the latest balance of forces.”779

Sensitive to the suggestion that he was disinterested in foreign affairs, it was in

the midst of this context that Clinton organised the so-called “Kennan

sweepstakes,”780 a competition to come up with a phrase that would encapsulate

the grand strategy of the administration.

The phrase decided upon was “democratic enlargement”; it was explicit about the

possibilities opened by the end of the Cold War and avoided the negativity of

“End of History” or “Clash of civilizations”. Crucially, it also articulated a goal,

although it was so distant that success or failure could not be measured in a

meaningful or, more to the point, a politically damaging sense.

In September 1993 Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake explained

to an audience at Johns Hopkins University that the United States would

transform its grand strategy “From containment to enlargement.”781 “Throughout

the Cold War,” Lake explained:

we contained a threat to market democracies; now we should seek to enlarge their reach, particularly in places of special significance to us. The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement – enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.782

Lake clarified the four kinds of action which would underpin the strategy:

Commencement Ceremony in West Point, New York” (29 May 1993), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=46638&st=&st1=#axzz1oPnzaRQU [accessed 15/08/11]. 779 Brinkley, “Democratic Enlargement,” 113. 780 Ibid.,114–15; Derek H. Chollet and James M. Goldgeier, America between the Wars, 11/9 to 9/11: The Misunderstood Years between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 65–72. 781 Lake, “From Containment to Enlargement.” 782 Ibid.

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(1) “We should strengthen the community of major market democracies – including our own – which constitutes the core from enlargement is proceeding.”

(2) “We should help foster and consolidate new democracies and market economies, where possible in states of special significance and opportunity.”

(3) “We must counter aggression – and support the liberalization – of states hostile to democracy and markets.”

(4) “We need to pursue our humanitarian agenda not only by providing aid, but also by working to help democracy and market economics take root in regions of greatest humanitarian concern.”783

The speech was a self-conscious invocation of Wilson in which Lake railed

against the “neo-know-nothings”784 who believed that America could retreat from

responsibility. Markets and democracies were Lakes’s solution to all foreign-

policy problems, but the strategy of enlargement rejected the expansionist view

that the United States was duty-bound to promote democracy and human rights

everywhere. Both self-interest and the common good were served by the mix of

principle and pragmatism:

The expansion of market-based economics abroad helps expand our exports and create American jobs, while it also improves living conditions and fuels demands for political liberalization abroad. The addition of new democracies makes us more secure because democracies tend not to wage war on each other or sponsor terrorism.785

Clinton echoed the speech the following week at the UN, echoing the enlargement

strategy and developing his vision of the effects of globalisation:

We cannot solve every problem . . . but we must and will serve as a fulcrum for change and a pivot point for peace. In a new era of peril and opportunity, our overriding purpose must be to expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies.786

The intellectual wellspring of the Clinton policy flowed mainly from Lake,

Madeline Albright, and Strobe Talbott. Several core ideas bound this group. They

shared an aversion to pure power politics and, in their view, a balance of power 783 Ibid. 784 Ibid. 785 Ibid. 786 Clinton, “Remarks to the 48th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.”

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and traditional geopolitics were ill-suited to the new era and were no longer

sufficient reasons to spend U.S. resources.787 They agreed that the use of force

should not be limited to the defence of vital interests but should extend to

disinterested intervention in the name of moral principles when the will and

conscience of the international community was breached. Force should be discreet

and carefully applied. Finally, they believed that the test of a valid foreign policy

was whether it would receive domestic and international support.788

However, there were also important differences between them. Lake and Talbott

were determined to define limits on the use of U.S. power, whereas Albright

believed the problem was how to legitimise the exercise of power. She argued that

international support legitimised actions, and whilst Talbott and Lake did not

disagree, they were less hawkish. All three attributed great importance to the UN;

Albright said that the UN would be central to Clinton’s new internationalism and

that history would record the end of the Cold War as the beginning of a new era

for the UN. She went so far as to say that ‘state building operations’ would be

“another dimension of collective security.”789

Observers of the Washington scene reported a struggle between Lake and Warren

Christopher (then Secretary of State) to define the President’s approach to foreign

policy. Lake pushed the ‘strategy of enlargement’ with a globalist, moralist, and

interventionist thrust. Christopher privately supported a strategy of active

engagement which was less ambitious and based on the premise, as one of

Christopher’s swiftly disavowed aides recognised, that “We [America] simply

don’t have the leverage, we don’t have the influence, we don’t have the

inclination to use military force.”790 While he was forced to reassert American

leadership, Christopher had wanted America to have a limited focus on certain

787 Hyland, Clinton’s World, 21. 788 Ibid. 789 Madeleine K. Albright, “Building a Collective Security System: Statement before the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East and On International Security, International Organizations, and Human Rights of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Washington, DC” (3 May 1993), http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/briefing/dispatch/1993/html/Dispatchv4no19.html [accessed 15/08/11]. 790 Daniel Williams and John N. Goshko, “Administration Rushes to ‘Clarify’ Policy Remarks,” Washington Post, 27 May 1993.

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key geographic regions such as Russia, Western Europe, East Asia, and the

Middle East.791

Step three of contextual analysis: the strategy of engagement and

enlargement as an ideological move

Step three of Skinnerian contextual analysis focuses on how ideologies are

identified and how they form, are criticised, and change. This section will analyse

the strategy of engagement and enlargement as an ideological move – that is, the

degree to which the strategy was conventional and the nature of any ideological

innovation. The analysis will demarcate the point at which ideological

reinforcement or change was attempted.

Lake characterised the Clinton administration’s overall strategy as pragmatic neo-

Wilsonianism. For the United States the choice was either isolation or a new

doctrine of internationalism: not Wilson’s crusading idealism, but a practical

application of his principles of democracy.792 According to Lake, Wilson’s core

beliefs – spreading democracy to other nations, adhering to principles, and

stressing the need for engagement – were more vital than ever. Americans could

not fully embrace power politics as represented by Theodore Roosevelt’s doctrine,

but they could rally around Wilson’s “deeper resonance”, allowing the United

States to lead the world in the name of principle.793 Wilson had understood, Lake

argued, that what occurred within nations fundamentally affected what occurred

between them. Therefore, the “character of foreign regimes” would shape U.S.

security.794

Strobe Talbott reinforced Lake’s Wilsonian vision. He asserted that other nations’

internal affairs were no longer off-limits. Humanitarian intervention was gaining

acceptance. Americans wanted U.S. foreign policy to be rooted in “idealpolitik as

well as realpolitik.”795 Lake agreed that overwhelming violations of human rights

791 Steven A. Holmes, “Christopher Reaffirms Leading U.S. Role,” New York Times, 28 May 1993. 792 Chollet and Goldgeier, America between the Wars, 69. 793 Ibid. 794 Lake, “From Containment to Enlargement”; Thomas L. Friedman, “Clinton’s Foreign Policy,” New York Times, 31 October 1993; Jason DeParle, “The Man Inside Bill Clinton’s Foreign Policy,” New York Times, 20 August 1995. 795 Strobe Talbott, “Democracy and the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs, 75, no. 6 (1996): 47.

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might require the use of force.796 Rectifying human-rights abuses was a

completely new rationale for U.S. military intervention.

Joseph Nye of Harvard University, who later served in the Central Intelligence

Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense under Clinton, wrote about the new

liberal dispensation in foreign policy. According to Nye, the evolution of

transnational communications, economic integration, and interdependence were

making more relevant a “liberal conception of a world society of peoples, as well

as states and of order resting on values and institutions as well as military

power.”797 Liberal views once regarded as utopian now seemed less far-fetched.

Nye wrote that the idea of a UN force that would preserve international order was

“an idea worth detailed practical examination” in the aftermath of the Cold War

and Gulf War.798

Some outside policy groups reinforced the administration’s thinking. The

Progressive Policy Institute, a creation of the Democratic Party, strongly

advocated putting commercial diplomacy at the centre of America’s new security

strategy.799 For example, trade policies and other leverage could be used to

encourage political and economic change in China. Other recommendations

included encouraging and aiding democratic forces abroad that were struggling to

hold free elections; revamping foreign aid by shifting from country-by-country

assistance to broader goals; replacing the Cold War military establishment with

more mobile and more flexible forces capable of rapid deployment to regional

trouble spots; and reinvigorating the institutions of collective security.800

All of these musings were converted into Lake’s Johns Hopkins’s speech on 21

September 1993. He declared that the purpose of U.S. power was to preserve and

promote democracies. The strategy of enlarging democracies would replace the

strategy of containment. Lake argued that America’s security mission was to

promote democracy and market economies. Democracies did not fight each other,

796 Anthony Lake, “American Power and American Diplomacy,” U.S. Department of State Dispatch, 5, no. 46 (14 November 1994): 766–9. 797 Nye, “What New World Order?” 89. 798 Ibid., 92–3. 799 Will Marshall, Martin Schram, and Progressive Policy Institute (U.S.), Mandate for Change (New York: Berkley Books, 1993), 317–18. 800 Ibid., 318.

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he asserted.801 Lake insisted that the United States should not only help

democracies but support the liberalisation of nations hostile to democracy.

‘Backlash’ states, such as Iran and Iraq, would have to be isolated. Lake

weakened his case by adding the caveat that the United States would “at times

need to befriend and even defend undemocratic states for ‘mutually beneficial

reasons.”802

Throughout spring 1994 the White House considered a number of draft proposals

for a national-security strategy as it tried to reconcile the different perspectives of

the State Department, the Pentagon, and other government departments. In July

1994 the administration issued President Clinton’s first comprehensive strategy

document, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement.803 As

the title suggests, the president chose to straddle the issue in the hope that, over

time, seemingly opposing viewpoints could be reconciled. From then on, the

formulations and general objectives outlined in the strategy documents that the

administration annually sent to Congress changed little and may be assumed to

reflect the continuity of Clinton’s basic outlook on foreign policy.

Neo-Wilsonianism was appealing to a nation exhausted by the Cold War, but

Wilsonianism was a utopian island in a world dominated by new, virulent

nationalism, religious fanaticism, the disintegration of empires, the demise of

ideology, regional wars, and superpower disarray.

In some senses it is hard to reconcile the ideological impetus of the strategy of

engagement and enlargement with the realities of Clinton’s foreign policy. It is

important to remember that whilst Clinton tried to situate his grand strategy

within the larger democratic, exceptionalist tradition, he was not prepared to

engage in “reckless crusades”804 to expand the realm of international freedom.

Whilst he accepted that America had a special destiny, this did not mean it could

or would force its ideals on other nations. “Our actions” abroad, he suggested, had

“always to be tempered with prudence and common sense.” After all, he

801 Lake, “From Containment to Enlargement.” 802 Ibid. 803 White House, “A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement.” 804 William J. Clinton, “American Foreign Policy and the Democratic Ideal, Institute of World Affairs, Milwaukee” (1 October 1992), in “President-Elect Clinton’s Foreign Policy Statements December 12, 1991–November 4, 1992,” Foreign Policy Bulletin, 3, no. 3 (1992): 21.

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continued, there were “some countries and some cultures” that were “many steps

away from democratic institutions.”805 The speech heavily indicated that

democracy promotion was not a moral duty to override all other goals but one

objective that would help guarantee America’s place in the globalised world.806

Talbott reinforced these points. Whilst his argument criticised isolationists for not

comprehending why the support of democracy in certain countries was in

America’s interest, he was also careful to distinguish between a policy driven by

ideals and Clinton’s, which was guided by enlightened self-interest. He concluded

that support for democracy was “not an absolute imperative.”807

This showed the nature and, perhaps more importantly, the limits of Clinton’s

ideological innovation. He was prepared to refashion American exceptionalism, to

adopt the Wilsonian crusade of democracy promotion, but only insofar as it would

bolster America and, in particular, American trade. His vision comingled

domestic and foreign policy.

The once bright line between domestic and foreign policy is blurring. If I could do anything to change the speech patterns of those of us in public life, I would almost like to stop hearing people talk about foreign and domestic policy and, instead start discussing economic policy, security policy, environmental policy – you name it.808

Therefore, the focus of U.S. substantive foreign policy was to be on the North

American–European–Japanese core and the international economic regimes,

institutions, and arrangements designed to foster trade. This was necessary

because the assumption that U.S. economic recovery and long-term prosperity

were inextricably intertwined with global economic growth, especially of the

democratic capitalist core, was at the heart of the Clinton administration’s

strategic assessment and response. The domestic and the foreign were co-

constitutive. This political–economic nexus was considered the essence of U.S.

security policy in an international system in which there were no plausible

challengers to U.S. security as traditionally conceived.

805 Ibid. 806 Ibid. 807 Talbott, “Democracy and the National Interest,” 52. 808 William J. Clinton, “Remarks at a Freedom House Breakfast” (6 October 1995), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=50612&st=&st1=#axzz1oPnzaRQU [accessed 15/08/11].

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When the Clinton administration engaged beyond the democratic capitalist core,

however, its international strategy lost clarity. The geostrategic areas of greatest

concern were Russia, the remnants of the former Soviet Union, and China.

Economic engagement was part of Clinton’s approach, but the perilous state of

the economies and political institutions of Russia and Central Europe precluded

their rapid incorporation into the core. Insofar as Russia and China had been the

foci of containment, Cold War residua now demanded attention. Not surprisingly,

the approach to enlargement in Russia and China was weighted toward more

traditional political and strategic issues of arms control, nonproliferation, and

shoring up the teetering presidency of Boris Yeltsin.809

With respect to Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea810 the administration

adopted the language and instrumentality of containment, not the modalities of

economic engagement. For example, U.S.–Iraqi relations remained frozen in

economic sanctions and a low-intensity air war of attrition. In the Middle East

Clinton personally engaged in intense diplomatic efforts with regard to the

Palestinian–Israeli conflict. For more than twenty years his predecessors had

worked the same agenda, and his efforts toward resolving the conflict also failed.

In its original conception of foreign-policy strategy, the Clinton administration

considered humanitarian intervention a tertiary priority. However, the complex

political and humanitarian disaster of Balkan disintegration remained a top

priority throughout Clinton’s presidency and led to NATO’s first military action.

U.S. policy was anything but strategic in conception and implementation.

Initially, the administration attempted to disengage through a policy of sceptical

support for European and UN diplomacy and peacekeeping in Bosnia during

1993–4. By the late summer of 1995 that policy failed, as Serbs overran what was

supposed to be a UN-protected safe area. Only after the Clinton administration led

a UN-sanctioned NATO air campaign did the following occur: a ceasefire;

negotiations near Dayton, Ohio in November; and, finally, a NATO-based

peacekeeping force, under UN mandate, on the ground.811

809 Talbott, The Russia Hand. 810 The “Backlash States,” as Lake called them: see Anthony Lake, “Confronting Backlash States,” Foreign Affairs, 73, no. 2 (1994): 45–55. 811 Dumbrell, Clinton’s Foreign Policy, 82–8.

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Nonetheless, the Balkan Wars persisted with the Kosovan conflict. The Clinton

administration rejected European appeals to seek UN Security Council

legitimisation of military action in Kosovo. Instead Clinton pushed for and

received authorisation for NATO air strikes against Serbia, which would last three

months.

Despite its early reluctance, the Clinton administration ultimately enlarged the

U.S. presence in the Balkans. The UN Security Council sanctioned the U.S.-led

NATO intervention in Bosnia but not the Kosovo intervention. Throughout the

1990s the Clinton administration had repeated its commitment to engagement and

enlargement through multilateralism in order to construct a liberal international

order. However, Operation Allied Force, although justified with the moral

imperatives of humanitarian intervention by a willing NATO coalition, was

essentially a U.S.-led intervention against a sovereign state acting without

Security Council authorisation. This was not altogether surprising, as Lake had

explicitly refused to privilege multilateralism, though he had hoped “that the

habits of multilateralism may one day enable the rule of law to play a more

civilizing role in the conduct of nations, as envisioned by the founders of the

United Nations.”812

By the end of the 1990s the strategy of engagement and enlargement had lost its

focus. Although NATO, the very institutionalisation of the liberal democratic

core, had enlarged to include Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, its

internal balance, mission, and purpose had become problematic. During the

interventions in the Balkan Wars, especially in Kosovo, the radical asymmetry

between U.S. and European military capabilities had become obvious. In addition,

there were accumulating instances of U.S. impatience with European multilateral

diplomacy in the Balkans and the International Criminal Court. Thus, there were

fissures within the democratic capitalist core of the post-Cold War world.

The Battle of Mogadishu, the prolonged and brutal struggle in the Balkans, the

collapse of negotiations in the Middle East, the failure to contain ‘backlash’

nations, and, by the end of Clinton’s second term, the emergence of an al Qaeda

capable of bombing the World Trade Center all indicated that much of the world

812 Lake, “From Containment to Enlargement.”

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was far less receptive to U.S. ideas of market economics and liberal democracy

than the first post-Cold War administration had assumed.

The Clinton administration had come into power with significant intellectual

baggage. This was not a hangover of 1960s radical chic,813 but a more traditional

liberal critique of U.S. policy: the nation had been too preoccupied with power; its

foreign policy had not reflected Americans’ ideals; the nation had failed to

support human rights abroad; too often it had acted unilaterally in support of a

national interest that was too narrowly defined.

The administration had come to power vowing that it would not simply refine or

remake Bush’s new world order. Instead it would create its own grand strategy.

However, although the president and his advisors were comfortable with moments

of Wilsonian-inspired rhetoric and were determined to pursue Wilsonian goals,

Clinton himself was more of a centrist. His preoccupation with domestic politics

overshadowed his interest in foreign affairs:

His advisors mistook this as a green light to pursue their own policy predilections. When their views clashed with reality, they needed Clinton’s firm support, but Clinton was not inclined to take political risks for policies he never fully embraced.814

Step four of contextual analysis: the strategy of engagement and enlargement

and the alteration of political vocabulary

Step four of Skinnerian contextual analysis centres on the relation between

political ideology and political action. This sections starts from Skinner’s

observation that political vocabulary contains intersubjectively normative terms

which simultaneously describe and evaluate. Skinner argued that a society

establishes and alters its moral identity by manipulating normative terms. He

noted a tension between political actors’ desire to tailor their normative language

to fit their projects and the reality that projects must be altered to fit the available

normative language.815

813 From the outset of his election campaign Clinton was criticised for supposedly being a 1960s radical. Bernard von Bothmer, Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 158–65. 814 Hyland, Clinton’s World, 26. 815 Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1: xii–xiii.

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American jubilation at the Cold War’s conclusion masked significant unresolved

strategic and rhetorical problems. Since the mid-1940s a particular conception of

American exceptionalism incorporating the concept of ‘national security’

(explored in Chapter 4) had served as a profoundly unifying concept. Yoking

foreign policy, military decisions, and domestic affairs, this nationalistic concept

blended moralism and pragmatism.

Neither President Clinton nor President Bush employed an unmodified Cold War

rhetorical paradigm to explain U.S. grand strategy, but nor did they completely

abandon Cold War rhetoric. Cold War political vocabulary enabled both

presidents to anchor their political projects. Clinton’s rhetoric of a democratic

world order perpetuated some Cold War themes. The vocabulary and

constructions in which this rhetoric was embedded had strong overtones of

national insecurity and vulnerability.

Efforts to move away from Cold War premises characterised Clinton’s rhetorical

model, which represented an attempt to redefine the basis of U.S. national

security, principally by linking U.S. domestic policy (especially economic policy)

to foreign-policy concerns. However, in detailing the changes confronting the

United States after the Cold War Clinton resorted to the familiar trope of war

metaphors, which he used most frequently when describing weapons of mass

destruction and the outlaw nations, terrorists, and organised criminals who sought

to acquire them. He often bracketed his arguments with the reminder that the

United States was the “indispensable nation” and thereby reinforced the premises

of U.S. global interests and U.S. exceptionalism. Clinton did not attempt to

completely supplant Cold War discourse, but the Cold War provided more context

than rationale for his action:

The fact is America remains the indispensable nation. There are times when America and only America can make a difference between war and peace, between freedom and repression, between hope and fear. Of course, we can’t take on all the world’s burden. We cannot become its policemen. But where our interests and values demand it and where we can make a difference, America must act and lead.816

816 William J. Clinton, “Remarks on International Security Issues at George Washington University” (5 August 1996),

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In the post-Cold War environment, with no predictable adversary, no familiar

structure of conflict, and few external constraints, the challenge was to build a

new foundation from which to articulate a foreign policy, especially a policy that

most voters would tolerate if not embrace. Clinton and many members of his

diverse audience shared an interest in minimising foreign-policy costs and

promoting domestic prosperity. Clinton had come to office by downplaying

foreign affairs, emphasising instead the need for a new domestic agenda after

decades of national obsession with Cold War needs. He had promised to “focus

like a laser beam” on the economy if elected.817 His plan for promoting a healthier

economy and retiring the national debt involved downsizing the military and

reshaping it for new types of conflict.818 In a campaign address, he emphasised the

need for aligning foreign and domestic policy:

Throughout this campaign I have called for a new strategy for American engagement: to revamp our Cold War military forces to meet our nation’s changing security needs; encourage the consolidation and spread of democracy abroad; and restore America’s economic leadership at home and abroad. . . . [W]e are in a position to do more with less than at any time in our recent history. During the Cold War, we spent trillions to protect freedom where it was threatened. In this post-Cold War era, the West can spend a fraction of that amount to nurture democracy where it never before existed. America’s challenge in this era is not to bear every burden, but to tip the balance. . . . [M]ost important, none of this will be possible unless we restore America’s economic strength.819

The Cold War had led administrations to subordinate domestic concerns to an

international agenda. Reversing that approach, Clinton promised to make

domestic prosperity the driving influence on his foreign policy. In an echo of Paul

Kennedy, domestic economic renewal became inextricably linked to America’s

continued exceptionalist mission and in turn to the spread of democracy.

Lake, Clinton, Christopher, and Albright coordinated a set of addresses that

explained democratic enlargement as the logical post-Cold War successor to

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=53161&st=indispensable+nation&st1=#axzz1oPnzaRQU [accessed 15/08/11]. 817 Dan Balz, “Change Doesn’t Come Cheap,” Washington Post, 18 February 1993. 818 James M. McCormick, “Clinton and Foreign Policy: Some Lessons for a New Century,” in The Postmodern Presidency: Bill Clinton’s Legacy in U.S. Politics, ed. Steven E. Schier (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 63. 819 Clinton, “Speech to the Foreign Policy Association, 13.

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containment. Eight speeches820 presented within six weeks offered an

extraordinary opportunity to examine the self-conscious launch of a unified

foreign-policy frame. It is possible to examine these speeches, as they were

explicitly issued by the administration as coordinated texts delivering a single

grand strategy.

Certainly, aspects of democratic enlargement had twentieth-century antecedents.

For example, Wilson’s foreign policy had focused on expanding U.S. influence

and ideas. Eisenhower’s New Look programme had been aimed at reducing

defence costs while maintaining the military strength and flexibility needed to

deter aggressive forces and promote peace. Eisenhower’s administration had

argued that it was economically necessary for free nations to share the burdens of

defence costs. The New Look’s rhetorical and strategic success had depended on

the credible assertion of an ongoing U.S. prerogative to act and retaliate where,

when, and how America thought best. The United States had asserted the right to

choose among and reconfigure foreign-policy means, uncoupling U.S. military

capacity from commitments to use that capacity in any particular case.821 Like

Clinton, George H. W. Bush had faced the ill-defined threats of the post-Cold

War period and a concomitant lack of American interest in foreign policy. In

response, the Bush administration, too, had urged global integration of market

democracies and experimented with various rhetorical devices to make its case.822

Despite historical antecedents, the eight speeches that showcased democratic

enlargement suggested that it was a new approach for new times. Borrowing from

John F. Kennedy, the Clinton administration rhetorically declared the beginning

820 Madeleine K. Albright, “Use of Force in a Post-Cold War World,” U.S. Department of State Dispatch, 4, no. 39 (23 September 1993): 665–8; Albright, “Building a Collective Security System”; Warren Christopher, “Building Peace in the Middle East, Columbia University, New York” (20 September 1993), http://www.disam.dsca.mil/pubs/Vol%2016_1/Christopher.pdf [accessed 15/08/11]; Warren Christopher, “Remaking American Diplomacy in the Post-Cold War World,” U.S. Department of State Dispatch, 4, no. 42 (18 October 1993): 718–20; Warren Christopher, “The strategic priorities of American foreign policy” (4 November 1993), http://www.disam.dsca.mil/pubs/Vol%2016_2/Christopher.pdf [accessed 15/08/11]; Clinton, “Remarks to the 48th Session of the United Nations General Assembly”; Lake, “From Containment to Enlargement.”; Anthony Lake, “A Strategy of Enlargement and the Developing World,” U.S. Department of State Dispatch, 4, no. 45 (13 October 1993): 91–4. 821 Mark J. Schaefermeyer, “Dulles and Eisenhower on ‘Massive Retaliation’,” in Eisenhower’s War of Words: Rhetoric and Leadership, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1994). 822 Mary E. Stuckey, “Competing Foreign Policy Visions: Rhetorical Hybrids after the Cold War,” Western Journal of Communication, 59, no. 3 (1995): 216–21.

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of an era so unique that it rendered the past obsolete. Clinton told the UN General

Assembly, “It is clear that we live at a turning point in human history. Immense

and promising changes seem to wash over us every day. The Cold War is

over.”823 Albright suggested that the moment was similar in magnitude to 1918

and 1945.824 The current time was “a moment of immense democratic and

entrepreneurial opportunity”825 in which “the momentum of the Cold War no

longer propels us in our daily actions.”826 Americans “need a new lens and even a

new vocabulary . . . We must fashion new policies that reflect the immense

changes that have come with the end of the Cold War.”827

The Clinton administration argued for a world actively shaped through selective

U.S. engagement. In words that would be strikingly echoed by Robert Kaplan,

Albright forcefully warned that the United States should not withdraw into a post-

Cold War foxhole that would consign the rest of the world to “rot in its own

anarchy.”828 Christopher, too, advocated global involvement: “The new world we

seek will not emerge on its own. We must shape the transformation that is under

way in a time of great fluidity.”829 Lake opined:

America’s core concepts – democracy and market economics – are more broadly accepted than ever. . . . This victory of freedom is practical, not ideological: Billions of people on every continent are simply concluding, based on decades of their own hard experience, that democracy and markets are the most productive and liberating ways to organise their lives. . . . Our leadership is sought and respected in every corner of the world.830

While the administration’s discourse provided the grounds for continuing U.S.

global leadership, Clinton also explicitly stated that the United States would not

retreat from the position it had achieved at the end of the Second World War. For

Clinton, the United States occupied a ‘unique position’ in international politics in

the age of globalisation. He declared “There are times when only America can

make the difference between war and peace, between freedom and repression,

823 Clinton, “Remarks to the 48th Session of the United Nations General Assembly.” 824 Albright, “Building a Collective Security System.” 825 Lake, “From Containment to Enlargement.” 826 Clinton, “Remarks to the 48th Session of the United Nations General Assembly.” 827 Lake, “A Strategy of Enlargement and the Developing World,” 748. 828 Albright, “Use of Force in a Post-Cold War World,” 668. 829 Christopher, “The strategic priorities of American foreign policy.” 830 Lake, “From Containment to Enlargement.”

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between hope and fear. . . . [W]e must act and lead.”831 Clinton’s use of the phrase

“indispensable nation” in the speech was by now a familiar refrain which

reasserted America’s providential role in the world, linking to American

exceptionalism.

Clinton devoted considerable energy to making the case that the United States

should continue its providential mission. The case for leadership by the United

States was contained in two overarching and at times overlapping claims. First,

continuing the U.S. role as world leader venerated and emulated the legacy of

transitional leadership that American generations had shown in the past,

especially after the Second World War. Second, the United States needed to lead

so that it could shape a better future for itself and the international community.

Leadership by the United States was necessary to provide the proper direction for

change, and it was imperative to immediately chart the path because of the

opportunity’s fleeting nature. Both claims served to promote America’s

commitment to intervention and reaffirmed its position as global leader.

Clinton skilfully used and reshaped the rhetoric of America’s exceptionalist

mission to support his ideological programme. He publicly stated that a

continuance of U.S. global leadership was the proper response to “the third great

moment of decision in the 20th century, the third great transition period in U.S.

foreign affairs.”832 For Clinton, uncertainty about America’s future place in the

world resembled the uncertainty that had followed each world war:

Twice before in this century, history has asked the United States and the other great powers to provide leadership for a world ravaged by war. After World War I, that call went unanswered. The United States was too unwilling. The great powers turned inward, as violent, totalitarian powers emerged. We raised trade barriers. We sought to humiliate rather than rehabilitate the vanquished. And the result was instability, then depression, and ultimately a Second World War.833

By causally linking the rise of totalitarianism, economic depression, and

America’s historical unwillingness to play a global leadership role Clinton

forcefully made the case for continued involvement in world affairs. This 831 William J. Clinton, “Remarks to the Community in Detroit” (22 October 1996), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=52146&st=&st1=#axzz1oWbalEIh [accessed 15/08/11]. 832 Clinton, “Remarks at the American University Centennial Celebration.” 833 Ibid.

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rhetorical call was attached to specific policy decisions. In 1993 Clinton

convinced sceptical Republicans in the U.S. Senate to support a financial

stabilisation package for Russia. Clinton would later recall that Bob Dole “came

around on the argument that we didn’t want to foul up the post-Cold War era the

way the victors in World War I had done. Their short-sightedness contributed

mightily to World War II.”834

Clinton’s second important historical analogy invoked an idealised vision of U.S.

action in the wake of the Second World War:

When World War II was won, profound uncertainty clouded the future. Europe and Japan were buried in rubble. Their peoples were weary. People did not know what to expect or what would happen. But because of the vision of the people who were our predecessors here in the United States, . . . the path that was followed after World War I was abandoned and instead the world was embraced with optimism and hope.835

Although Clinton’s recollection of the attitudes of postwar American

policymakers was selective at best and misleading at worst, he invoked a

particularised historical vision that the post-Cold War transition should ‘benefit’

from U.S. leadership and, most importantly, stability.

Although historical analogy provided stability for the strategy of engagement and

enlargement, the ideological innovativeness of the strategy became apparent as it

looked to the future. For Clinton, U.S. leadership was vital to shape the present

and future environment toward U.S. national interests. Leadership by the United

States was urgently needed because the forces of globalisation were transforming

the global landscape. “Change is upon us,” Clinton stated. “We can do nothing

about that.”836 If the United States did not proactively manage change across the

globe, its global position would be compromised. Clinton saw Americans as

properly “shapers of events, not observers of it.” If they failed to act, “the moment

834 William J. Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 206–7. 835 William J. Clinton, “Remarks on the Upcoming Economic Summit” (5 July 1994), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=50441&st=&st1=#axzz1oWbalEIh [accessed 15/08/11]. 836 William J. Clinton, “Remarks to the Seattle APEC Host Committee” (19 November 1993), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=46137&st=&st1=#axzz1oWbalEIh [accessed 15/08/11].

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will pass and we will lose the best possibilities of our future. We face no

imminent threat, but we do have an enemy. The enemy of our time is inaction.”837

Clinton’s words revealed three important beliefs. First, the United States must

commit to global leadership so that the international environment could be

moulded to the country’s benefit. Second, if the United States did not shape the

future in its image the country would lose its influence on the world’s direction

and, over the long term, experience decline. Third, the United States had only a

short time in which to shape globalism and must, therefore, seize the moment.

This last belief contradicted a central tenet of U.S. exceptionalism, the belief that

the United States had the perennial ability to escape the deterioration that other

great powers eventually experienced. Traditionally, U.S. presidents, including

George H. W. Bush, had upheld that tenet. Clinton was different in that he saw

America’s position as a temporary result of human agency; depending on

circumstances, the United States could lose its power.

Clinton admitted as much in his first inaugural address. He stated that, despite the

end of the Cold War, America was just as vulnerable as other countries:

Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the cold war assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds and new plagues. Raised in unrivaled prosperity, we inherit an economy that is still the world’s strongest but is weakened by business failures, stagnant wages, increasing inequality, and deep divisions among our own people.838

During his presidency, Clinton refashioned the notion of U.S. exceptionalism.

Although he would continue traditional advocacy of U.S. intervention, with

echoes of declinism and even Huntington, Clinton knew that U.S. primacy might

not last. By continuing to lead and construct the international landscape in a way

that promoted U.S. interests, America could obtain some security even if it lost

some power. The future of the globalised international community could be drawn

in America’s image.

837 William J. Clinton, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union” (4 February 1997), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=53358&st=&st1=#axzz1oWbalEIh [accessed 15/08/11]. 838 Clinton, “Inaugural Address,”

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Clinton’s logic extended further, in more familiar ways. The United States must

shape the changes brought by globalisation not only for its own security but also

for the world’s. Clinton stated:

Change is inevitable but the particular change is not. And we have to make some decisions to seize the opportunities and meet the challenges before us. To put it another way, the train of globalization cannot be reversed, but it has more than one possible destination. If we want America to be on the right track, if we want other people to stay on the right track and have the opportunity to enjoy peace and prosperity, we have no choice but to try and lead the train.839

Clinton saw the age of globalisation as unruly. In his view, leadership by the

United States acted as a counterweight to the unpredictable state of the

international environment. Using the mission of exceptionalism to justify

continued U.S. engagement and leadership, Clinton simultaneously highlighted

the limits of U.S. leadership. This was an important ideological innovation, a

significant departure from traditional exceptionalist discourse.

Apart from his unprecedented acknowledgement of temporal limits to U.S. power,

Clinton saw U.S. leadership as limited by the amount of power the United States

actually had and the extent to which it could make leadership commitments.

Clinton stated “We can’t take on all the world’s burden. . . . We cannot become its

policeman.”840 The implication was that America’s power to lead was great but

the international community needed to share the burden of leadership.

Acceptance of this point constituted acceptance of at least partial decline from

America’s Cold War position. Clinton was making a strategic commitment

markedly different from that of his Cold War predecessors. John F. Kennedy had

claimed that the United States would be a leader that would “pay any price, bear

any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the

survival and the success of liberty.”841 Unlike Kennedy, Clinton had no clearly

defined enemy to oppose; moreover, George H. W. Bush’s failure to be re-elected

839 William J. Clinton, “Remarks at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, Nebraska” (8 December 2000), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=957&st=&st1=#axzz1oWbalEIh [accessed 15/08/11]. 840 Clinton, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union” (25 January 1994). 841 John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address” (20 January 1961), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=8032#axzz1oWbalEIh [accessed 15/08/11].

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partly reflected the American public’s limited appetite for international

engagement. The United States would have to pick and choose its battles.

Although Clinton still intended to pursue America’s exceptionalist mission, it

would be in tandem with a recalibration of America’s organisational and regional

relationships.

In Clinton’s construction of the post-Cold War world, multidimensional

interdependence and globalisation were the dominant constitutive dynamics of an

emergent global system. In that worldview, traditional security concerns persisted;

however, insofar as economic forces of globaliation grew in importance, security

was redefined in terms of trade and economics. From Clinton’s perspective, the

proper strategic response to this new world was engagement. Because the

economic forces of globalisation derived from America’s most fundamental

values and strengths,842 the United States should embrace interdependence and

globalisation. Globalisation, then, would become both an instrument and an end

of U.S. foreign and national-security policy. Insofar as U.S. strategy was based on

engaging the forces of globalisation and strengthening the institutions for

regulating and fostering liberal globalisation, the sphere of democratic capitalism

would be expanded and U.S. strategic interests advanced.

With respect to Clinton’s reworking of exceptionalist discourse, the tension

between multilateralism and unilateralism indicated the extent to which the

administration’s early involvement in multilateral UN peacekeeping operations

had evaporated after the Battle of Mogadishu. U.S. withdrawal from Somalia was

soon followed by new doctrine regarding U.S. approval of or involvement in UN

peacekeeping operations. Presidential Decision Directive 25843 seemed to ensure

that few, if any, multilateral peacekeeping operations would include U.S.

involvement without a priori agreement to U.S. command and control.844 The

842 G. John Ikenberry, “America’s Liberal Grand Strategy,” in American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts, ed. Michael Cox, G. John Ikenberry, and Takashi Inoguchi (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), suggests that a grander ‘American project’ throughout the post-Second World War period was the building of exactly this type of order. This thesis has depicted less consistent U.S. ambitions over that period of time but would agree with Ikenberry’s model in the specific context of the Clinton Presidency. 843 White House, “Presidential Decision Directive/NSC-25” (3 May 1994), http://www.clintonlibrary.gov/_previous/Documents/2010%20FOIA/Presidential%20Directives/PDD-25.pdf [accessed 15/08/11]. 844 Ibid.

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United States would not support UN missions that “impinge directly on the

national security interests of America or its allies.”845

America’s refusal to support decisive multilateral intervention in Rwanda and her

vacillating response to European and UN operations in Bosnia were consistent

with this stance. When decisive international action came to the Balkans in 1995

and to Kosovo in 1999 it was in the form of U.S.-led and U.S.-implemented air

wars. Indeed, in the latter campaign the Clinton administration explicitly rejected

trying to obtain UN Security Council authorisation. Instead, the administration

prepared for what was essentially U.S. action by gaining a priori NATO approval

for the United States to act without UN authorisation. Clinton seemed

unconcerned that the resulting intervention was regarded as a violation of the UN

Charter with respect to the use of force.846

In sum, from the outset the Clinton administration showed strategic drift. Early

on, Lake explicitly refused to adopt a rigidly multilateralist posture. In the same

speech in which he laid out the fundamentals of the Clinton administration’s

strategy of engagement and enlargement, he concluded:

For any official with responsibilities for our security policies, only one overriding factor can determine whether the U.S. should act multilaterally or unilaterally, and that is America’s interests. We should act multilaterally where doing so advances our interests – and we should act unilaterally when that will serve our purpose. The simple question in each instance is this: What works best?847

Step five of contextual analysis: “enlargement,” the new world order?

Step five of Skinnerian contextual analysis focuses on the question “What forms

of political thought and action are involved in disseminating and

845 Madeleine K. Albright, “Building a Consensus on International Peace-Keeping, Statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” U.S. Department of State Dispatch, 4, no. 46 (20 October 1993), http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/briefing/dispatch/1993/html/Dispatchv4no46.html [accessed 15/08/11]. 846 After the NATO action began, the Russian Federation’s representative on the Security Council proposed a resolution to declare the NATO action unlawful. The proposed resolution was supported by three states, including Russia and China. See Louis Henkin, “Kosovo and the Law of ‘Humanitarian Intervention’,” The American Journal of International Law, 93, no. 4 (1999): 825–6. 847 Lake, “From Containment to Enlargement.”

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conventionalizing ideological change?”848 Such analysis illuminates how some

ideological change becomes conventional, woven into ways of acting.

From the outset Clinton and his team sought a more open system of international

relations in which the United States would lead through consensus, markets, and

institutions, in place of Bush’s new world order, which they perceived as having

“failed to articulate clear goals.”849 Their approach to foreign policy was liberal

and internationalist. The United States would be less imposing militarily, but it

would exert greater political, economic, and cultural influence abroad. Nye’s

phrase “soft power”850 captured Clinton’s approach.

When Clinton entered office an elderly George Kennan urged the new president,

via Strobe Talbott, to avoid “oversimplification” and develop a “thoughtful

paragraph or more” explaining U.S. interests, aims, and challenges.851 Tony Lake

hoped that his September 1993 speech would do just that and have an effect

similar to that of Kennan’s “Long Telegram.”852 Despite critics who accuse

Clinton of strategic drift and inconsistency at a policy level, this chapter has

argued that the Clinton administration successfully harnessed wide-ranging debate

about America’s purpose into a rebooted ideological narrative which informed

their grand strategy.

From the outset, Clinton incorporated some of the arguments of declinists such as

Paul Kennedy, who emphasised the need for American economic regeneration.

Clinton’s foreign policy was rooted in a number of interlinked assumptions: first,

“foreign and domestic policy are two sides of the same coin,” and, second, “If

we’re not strong at home we can’t be strong abroad. If we can’t compete in the

global economy, we’ll pay for it at home.”853 The innovative aspect was the

Clinton administration’s linkage of American domestic renewal with the

economics of the global market and in turn with democracy promotion. As this

848 Tully, “The Pen is a Mighty Sword,” 7–8. 849 Clinton, “Speech to the Foreign Policy Association,” 9. 850 Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 153–71. 851 George Kennan, quoted in Chollet and Goldgeier, America between the Wars, 13. 852 Brinkley, “Democratic Enlargement: The Clinton Doctrine,” 114. 853 William J. Clinton, “Speech to World Affairs Council, Los Angeles” (13 August 1992) in “President-Elect Clinton’s Foreign Policy Statements December 12, 1991–November 4, 1992,” Foreign Policy Bulletin, 3, no. 3 (1992): 13.

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chapter has demonstrated, the administration repeatedly highlighted what they

perceived as the positive link between capitalism and democracy.854 Support for

market democracy was Lake’s solution to most foreign-policy problems. His view

was based on democratic peace theory. According to Lake, support of markets and

democracies served both self-interest and the common good; it was both high

principle and basic pragmatism. His “From Containment to Enlargement” speech

framed the administration’s foreign policy. Indeed, “what Clinton liked best about

Lake’s enlargement policy was the way it was inextricably linked to economic

renewal with its emphasis on making sure the United States remained the number

one exporter.”855 There was more to it than the simple self-interest of market-

access. As Cox suggests:

In some larger sense they really did think that over time democracy could not function without the market, or the market without democracy . . . and free enterprise the only secure foundation upon which to construct and sustain democracy . . . It was no accident that Clinton and his advisers persistently coupled the two words together and employed the term ‘market democracy’ to more fully describe the policy of enlargement.856

Despite many inconsistencies in policy over the next seven years, Lake’s speech

roughly characterised the aims of Clinton’s international activities. The

administration attempted to use economic incentives and promises of public

respectability to encourage democratic reform overseas.

America’s hesitation in the former Yugoslavia was exemplative of the problems

with Clinton’s grand strategy. As articulated by Lake and his successors, the

strategy of enlargement suggested preferences for market economies and for

democracies. However, it did not identify the key priorities in pursuing those

ends. Were the Balkans more important to U.S. interests than North Korea or

Iraq? Was stopping genocide more important than nurturing productive, stable

relations with regional leaders? Enlargement promised much without giving any

sense of trade-offs and sacrifices, even though those are the tough decisions that

should be at the core of any strategy.

854 This was a naïve assumption. Even champions of capitalism saw the link between the two as complex and opaque at best: see Irwin Stelzer, “A Question of Linkage: Capitalism, Prosperity, Democracy,” The National Interest (1994), 29–35. 855 Brinkley, “Democratic Enlargement: The Clinton Doctrine,” 117. 856 Cox, “Democracy Promotion under Clinton,” 233.

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The Clinton administration never thought systematically about the ‘hard-power’

capabilities it would need to pursue its ends.857 Clinton’s sophisticated

understanding of international political economy distracted him from thinking

seriously about when, where, and how the United States would deploy its military.

How would the United States integrate military capabilities into plans for

enlargement? Under what conditions would the nation send U.S. forces abroad?

Which threats would leaders emphasise in military procurement and planning? As

shown in Chapters 4 and 5, these questions were all central topics of debate

during the Cold War, but disappeared from the policy process during the Clinton

years.

Conclusion

The language of the Clinton administration promised a great deal with very little

sacrifice and Clinton’s reworking of U.S. exceptionalism promised a great deal

under U.S. stewardship. While hinting at multilateral burden sharing and setting

ill-defined limits to U.S. intervention, this reworking suggested that selective

engagement would entail little cost. Lake’s 1993 speech had suggested that the

United States could enlarge the landscape of democracy without hard military

choices.

For John Ikenberry, however, Clinton’s grand strategy was less innovative than it

might appear.858 He suggests that two orders were built in the 1940s. One was the

Cold War order that emerged from America’s struggle with the Soviet Union and

ended with the Soviet Union’s collapse. The other was the U.S.-led international

order that was built inside the bipolar system in the shadow of the Cold War. The

second order was the Western liberal order, reinforced by the Cold War.

However, it is less obvious that this liberal democratic agenda represented a grand

strategy rather than a collection of values shared between allies.

This chapter has suggested something distinct: that the Clinton grand strategy

went much further than Ikenberry’s conception of Western structural integration.

Clinton’s strategy envisaged a democratic peace led by exceptionalist America 857 Suri, “American Grand Strategy from the Cold War’s End to 9/11,” 623–4. 858 G. John Ikenberry, “The Restructuring of the International System after the Cold War,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 544–5.

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and predicated on the triad of domestic economic renewal, the spread of market

economics, and democracy promotion beyond the confines of the ‘West’. The

Clinton administration made a number of ideological issues conventional parts of

American foreign policy. First, the administration renewed the commitment to

American global involvement and reshaped it for the post-Cold War world.

Second, they gave renewed centrality to economic issues in U.S. foreign policy.

Whilst these had always been an issue, the Clinton administration gave them

particular ideological prominence, putting them on a par with traditional security

interests.859 The promotion of market economics became a significant part of

American grand strategy, intimately tied to democracy promotion and also at the

heart of the regeneration of American exceptionalism.860 For better or worse, the

third legacy Clinton bequeathed to the post-Cold War environment was the

confused ‘Clinton doctrine’ of humanitarian intervention and democracy

promotion, both of which would take on a new life under Clinton’s presidential

successor.

859 David E. Sanger, “A Grand Trade Bargain,” Foreign Affairs, 80, no. 1 (2001): 65. 860 McCormick, “Clinton and Foreign Policy,” 74–7.

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Chapter 7. The Bush Doctrine and the Neoconservative Moment

As the previous chapter demonstrated, the early post-Cold War era was one of

strategic ambiguity, but not because either George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton

avoided strategic articulation. Both presidents had pursued strategic policy very

different from containment.861 The phrases new world order, enlargement, and

beyond containment came to be used as expressions of fact, as having come to

pass, rather than being seen as attempts to fashion a successor to containment.

Under President Clinton there was a strong rearticulation of American purpose

which did led to recognisable grand strategy, albeit without the strictures of neatly

ordered adversaries or a rival ideology. Nonetheless, American thought about the

use of force remained undisciplined throughout the Clinton presidency. U.S.

interests and the threats to them were numerous and diffuse, and the Clinton

administration did not consider them in uniform terms.

This chapter will examine continuity and change in U.S. ideological tropes during

the presidency of George W. Bush, the post-Second World War president with

perhaps the most controversial foreign policy since that of the Vietnam War. It

will focus primarily on Bush’s grand strategy after 11 September 2001.862 In the

wake of a hotly disputed presidential election,863 Bush came to power as the

champion of compassionate conservatism at home. He was more concerned with

establishing his domestic authority than with foreign policy. His foreign-policy

campaign message had been largely realist and based on the promise that he

would pursue “distinctly American internationalism,”864 by which he meant not

only being more “humble” in recognising the limits of how far he could change

the international system but also a form of unilateralism that was distinct from the

861 Suri, “American Grand Strategy from the Cold War’s End to 9/11,” 614. 862 Hereafter ‘9/11’. 863 For details of the vote recount and controversial legal decision which decided the outcome of the election see Adam Cohen, “Has Bush V. Gore Become the Case That Must Not Be Named?” New York Times, 15 August 2006, A18; Howard Gillman, The Votes That Counted: How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 864 George W. Bush, “A Distinctly American Internationalism, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California” (19 November 1999), http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/wspeech.htm [accessed 05/03/10].

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presidencies of both Clinton and his father.865 George W. Bush expressly

criticised Clinton as a serial intervener and resolutely stated that he would steer

clear of nation-building.866 Indeed, “before 9/11 Bush struck his neocon and

hardline conservative supporters as a half-hearted unipolarist.”867 This is not to

suggest that American primacy was not already apparent in Bush’s pre-9/11

foreign policy and, as the next section makes clear, there were strands of both

realism and American primacy even before 9/11, reflecting the two strands of

Bush’s foreign-policy advisors. Nonetheless, 9/11 did have a transformative effect

and not only settled the orientation of the president’s strategic thinking but also

shifted the intellectual and political locus of grand strategy creation towards

neoconservatism and its stronghold within the Pentagon.868

Bush’s grand strategy after 9/11 is sometimes confusingly characterised as

“Wilsonianism with boots,”869 the suggestion being that it was primarily

concerned with democracy promotion and a strong degree of ideological

continuity with previous dominant understandings of American exceptionalism.870

This chapter disagrees with this suggestion of ideological continuity871 and seeks

865 James M. McCormick, “The Foreign Policy of the George W. Bush Administration,” in High Risk and Big Ambition: The Presidency of George W. Bush, ed. Steven E. Schier (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press; London: Eurospan, 2004), 194. 866 Michael Hirsh, “Bush and the World,” Foreign Affairs, 81, no. 5 (2002):22–3. 867 Gary J. Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana (London: Routledge, 2004), 2. 868 As Dodge suggests, “The Neoconservative approach of key advisors in Washington was certainly a factor in providing the moral justification for the deployment of force . . . Neo-Liberalism, with its long developed policy proscriptions for the reform of errant states and societies came to dominate both tactics and strategy on the ground in Baghdad.” See Dodge, “Coming Face to Face with Bloody Reality,” 260. 869 The phrase comes from Pierre Hassner, “The United States: The Empire of Force or the Force of Empire?” in Chaillot Papers no. 54 (Paris: Institute for Security Studies, 2002), 43. For others who suggested that George W. Bush’s project was essentially Wilsonian in terms of ideological underpinning and in that sense a recognizable evolution of earlier tropes of exceptionalism, see John Dumbrell, “The Bush Administration US Public Diplomacy and Iran,” SGIA Research Working Papers Series (Durham University, School of Government and International Affairs, Durham), no. 28 June (2007): 1–15; Stanley Hoffman, “American Exceptionalism: The New Version,” in American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, ed. Michael Ignatieff (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 232–3; Lawrence S. Kaplan, “Regime Change,” The New Republic (3 March 2003); David Kenendy, “What ‘W’ Owes to ‘WW’,” Atlantic Monthly (March 2005), 36–40; Tony Smith, A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (New York; London: Routledge, 2007), 46. 870 This chapter does not suggest that neoconservatism was a new ideology. It had been in part a response to the rise of the ‘new left’ in the 1960s but had also found cohesion stemming from its criticism of détente in the 1970s. See Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy, 25, 38, 100–115; Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 110–14. 871 For differing interpretations of whether the Bush doctrine represented continuity or change in U.S. foreign policy, see John Lewis Gaddis, “A Grand Strategy of Transformation,” Foreign

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to reconstruct the strategic arguments after 9/11. In doing so, it suggests that the

neoconservatives who flourished in the wake of that attack saw that moment in

time as an opportunity for a profound reworking of American exceptionalism.

They were engaged in an ideological project concerned not with democracy

promotion, in the liberal sense that Bill Clinton had envisaged, but rather with a

“‘new birth’ of the confidence we used to have in ourselves and in ‘America the

beautiful’.”872 In other words, they were concerned with what they perceived as a

decades-long domestic crisis in America and its resolution through both the

creation of an international order predicated on the maintenance of American

hegemony873 and their perception that “A liberal democracy that could fight a

short and decisive war every generation or so to defend its own liberty and

independence would be far healthier and more satisfied”.874 This was an

ideologically innovative grand strategy the aim of which was a very particular

conception of domestic regeneration, predicated on the export of a minimal form

of democracy, which helped sustain a particular international environment.

This chapter will analyse the Bush Doctrine and the ways in which it envisaged

‘the new world order’ and America’s place within it. Like the previous chapter,

this chapter will employ a form of Cambridge School contextualism and the

method’s five analytical steps will structure the chapter.

Step one of contextual analysis: the Bush Doctrine’s ideological and linguistic

context

The first step is concerned with examining the ideological and linguistic context

of the Bush Doctrine in order to understand the point of his administration’s grand

strategy. An ideology employs a language of politics defined by its conventions

Policy, no. 133 (2002): 50–57; Timothy J. Lynch and Robert Singh, After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Melvyn P. Leffler, “Bush’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy, no. 144 (2004): 22–8; G. John Ikenberry, “America’s Imperial Ambition,” Foreign Affairs, 81, no. 5 (2002): 44–60; Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2005). 872 Norman Podhoretz, “Syria Yes, Israel No?” Weekly Standard (12 November 2001), https://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/457edhtn.asp [accessed 05/03/10]. 873 See Jean-François Drolet, “A Liberalism Betrayed? American Neoconservatism and the Theory of International Relations,” Journal of Political Ideologies, 15, no. 2 (2010): 89–118; Drolet, American Neoconservatism. 874 Fukuyama, The End of History, 329.

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and usually employed by a number of writers. Methodologically, this

encompasses not just the use of specific lexical choices but also principles,

assumptions, and criteria for testing knowledge-claims. In short, this is meant as

an examination of the ideological context of the Bush presidency. This section

will pay particular attention to the differing pre-9/11 stance of Governor, then

President, Bush and the post-9/11 Bush Doctrine.

Bush’s foreign-policy positions during the 2000 presidential campaign flowed

from criticisms of Clinton during his presidency and from advice that Bush

received from his team of foreign-policy experts.875 Bush argued for increased

military spending and for the transformation and modernisation of America’s

armed forces. He criticised the “open-ended deployments and unclear military

missions”876 of the Clinton era and promised to be much more careful about

considering the consequences of sending U.S. forces abroad.877 He also called for

limited cuts in America’s military presence overseas, suggesting that, for

example, U.S. peacekeepers in Bosnia could be brought home.878

In many ways, Clinton’s grand strategy had continued the traditional Wilsonian

approach of building a world order based on the rule of law. During his October

2000 presidential debates with Al Gore, Bush underscored his scepticism

regarding “nation-building missions.” He indicated that, if he had been president,

he would not have intervened in Haiti or Somalia. Bush called for clear criteria for

the use of force based on “vital national interests” rather than humanitarian

objectives. He stated: “I would be guarded in my approach. I don’t think we can

be all things to all people in the world. I think we’ve got to be very careful when

we commit our troops.”879 This chimed with his earlier ‘Distinctly American

Internationalism’ speech.

875 The self-styled ‘Vulcans’ led by Condoleezza Rice. Rice was not a neoconservative herself but of the neoconservative Vulcans most had come from the mid-echelons of George H. W. Bush’s administration and included some of the authors of the infamous “Defense Planning Guidance” document. For the details of the composition of this group and the shift of influence within it, see Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 234–60. 876 George W. Bush, “A Period of Consequences, The Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina” (23 September 1999), http://www3.citadel.edu/pao/addresses/pres_bush.html [accessed 05/03/10]. 877 Ibid. 878 Ibid. 879 George W. Bush, “[First] Presidential Debate in Boston” (3 October 2000), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29418#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/10].

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In the defense of our nation, a president must be a clear-eyed realist. There are limits to the smiles and scowls of diplomacy. Armies and missiles are not stopped by stiff notes of condemnation. They are held in check by strength and purpose and the promise of swift punishment.880

In contrast to this apparent realism, later in the speech Bush set in motion an

important dynamic of his nascent foreign-policy thinking. He made explicit the

centrality of ideology to the creation of grand strategy:

Some have tried to pose a choice between American ideals and American interests – between who we are and how we act. But the choice is false. America, by decision and destiny, promotes political freedom – and gains the most when democracy advances . . . I will address these responsibilities . . . To each, I bring the same approach: A distinctly American internationalism. Idealism, without illusions. Confidence, without conceit. Realism, in the service of American ideals.881

That Bush was a naïf in terms of foreign policy during his presidential campaign

was not surprising: so too had Clinton been during his candidature. Nonetheless,

Clinton had expressed his views with a degree of eloquence and coherence which

the Texan governor did not match. This made deciphering Bush’s worldview

difficult, largely because there were elements of realism but also of idealism. The

philosophy was unremarkable in terms of what it posited as the goals of American

international engagement: security, prosperity, freedom, and the advancement of

democracy. What was distinctive was that it suggested that these goals should be

pursued through the unilateral exercise of American power.882

At the same time Governor Bush began to narrow his conception of the national

interest, in contrast to Al Gore’s inheritance of an effectively Clintonesque

foreign-policy platform. In the first presidential debate, when questioned about

the appropriate use of force, Bush replied:

Well, if it’s in our vital national interest, and that means whether our territory is threatened or people could be harmed, whether or not . . . our alliances are threatened, whether or not our friends in the Middle East are threatened. That would be a time to seriously consider the use of force . . . I don’t think we can be all things to all people in the world. I think we’ve got to be very careful when we commit our

880 Bush, “A Distinctly American Internationalism.” 881 Ibid. 882 Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound, 36.

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troops. The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation-building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders . . . I believe we’ve overextended in too many places. And therefore I want to rebuild the military power.883

Whilst Bush seemed to present himself as a realist and urged the prudent

application of force only when a narrow set of vital interests were challenged, his

final sentence was paradoxical. If he intended to reduce nation-building missions,

why did he also advocate the shoring-up of military power? It was a theme which

was asserted more vigorously in Bush’s inaugural address in January 2001:

We will build our defenses beyond challenge, less weakness invite challenge . . . The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake: America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom.884

This last phrase reappeared in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United

States,885 and the earlier usage in the inaugural address does not seem to have

attracted as much scholarly attention. The superficial effect of the phrase was to

suggest both affiliation with a realist strategic approach and continuity with

American democracy promotion of supposedly universalist values; however, “the

term does not really describe a ‘balance of power’ at all. Rather it is superficially

Realist-sounding terminology for a decidedly liberal notion: the coalition of all

major powers in furtherance of some notional common good.”886 However, the

very concept of ‘shaping’ a balance of power suggested American primacy in an

international order with shared values – in other words, not a balance of power at

all.

Despite the uneasy mixture of elements of realism and elements of profound

idealism, Bush’s rhetoric in the presidential debates and during his pre-9/11

presidency suggested a grand strategy that was more modest in terms of actual

intervention than that of his predecessor. Condoleezza Rice, who was his principal

883 Bush, “[First] Presidential Debate in Boston.” 884 George W. Bush, “Inaugural Address” (20 January 2001), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25853#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/10]; emphasis added. 885 White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States” (September 2002), http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/nsc/nss/2002/ [accessed 05/03/10], 3. 886 Adam Quinn, “‘The Deal’: The Balance of Power, Military Strength, and Liberal Internationalism in the Bush National Security Strategy,” International Studies Perspectives, 9, no. 1 (2008): 44.

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foreign-policy advisor at the time, reinforced this sense at the time, putting

forward a more straightforwardly realist worldview for the Bush campaign. She

echoed Bush’s more prominent campaign rhetoric when she suggested that the

primary foreign-policy goal should be the promotion of “national interests” above

all else.887 The rationale was that liberal humanitarian concerns would be of lower

priority than considerations of U.S. national interest. Bush stated in the third

presidential debate: “When it comes to foreign policy, that’ll be my guiding

question: is it in our nation’s interests?”888

Bush’s initial foreign-policy pronouncements and appointments reflected a split in

Republican thought about U.S. foreign policy. At the time commentators usually

expressed the split as between the ‘multilateralist’ position of Secretary of State

Colin Powell and the ‘unilateralist’ position of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick

Cheney.889 It is hard to understand the Bush speeches during the 2000 election as

unfettered support for neoconservatism. That is certainly not how Bush was

perceived by William Kristol and other prominent members of the Project for the

New American Century (PNAC). Kristol felt “moderately unhappy” about the

Bush/Cheney ticket throughout the election. Although Paul Wolfowitz had

contributed to some of Bush’s campaign speeches, Kristol suggested “I wouldn’t

say that if you read Wolfowitz’s Planning Guidance from 1992, and read most

Bush campaign speeches and his statements in the debates, you would say, ‘Hey,

Bush has really adopted Wolfowitz’s worldview’.”890 Speaking about Rice,

Kristol asserted that “She was skeptical about a lot of these claims that the U.S.

really had to shape a new world order . . . she was much more, I think, kind of a

cautious realist than she is today.”891

In a frequently quoted panegyric from 2001, Charles Krauthammer told his

readers that

887 Condoleezza Rice, “Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs, 79, no. 1 (2000): 45–62. 888 George W. Bush, “[Third] Presidential Debate in Winston-Salem, North Carolina” (11 October 2000), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/debates.php [accessed 05/03/10]. 889 Jon Leyne, “Rumsfeld Denies U.S. Foreign Policy Split,” BBC News Online (30 July 2001), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1464512.stm [accessed 05/03/10]; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Politics of Multilateralism,” Commentary No. 103 (15 December 2002), Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University, http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/103en.htm [accessed 05/03/10]. 890 William Kristol quoted in Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 141. 891 Ibid.

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An unprecedentedly dominant United States . . . is in the unique position of being able to fashion its own foreign policy. . . . [T]he first task of the new administration is precisely to reassert American freedom of action.892

For Krauthammer, U.S. unipolarity was a given, as it had equally been under

Clinton. What the foreign-policy debate during the election of 2000 and the early

months of the Bush presidency centred on was not whether the United States

would engage in the world but how.

Krauthammer’s brand of unilateralism found a home in the PNAC, formed in

1997 to advance neoconservatism. The choice of their name seems less than

accidental, echoing Henry Luce’s “American Century” fifty years earlier. Ronald

Reagan was their hero and Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were cast as opponents

of U.S. hegemony.893 The PNAC advocated substantial increases in U.S. military

spending, aggressive pursuit of U.S. interests, and support for U.S. hegemony.

Reagan “Championed American exceptionalism when it was deeply

unfashionable,”894 wrote the PNAC’s two founders, who suggested in the same

article that the United States should seek to overturn dictators and that “The

purpose was not Wilsonian idealistic whimsy . . . Support for American principles

around the world can be sustained only by the continuing exertion of American

influence.”895 George H. W. Bush joined Clinton as a subject of attack from the

PNAC: “Republicans have spent the past few years attacking Clinton for his

handling of Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti and Somalia,” Kagan said, “Yet every one of

these was an unexploded Bush bomblet.” Bush’s greatest sin, in the view of

PNAC, had been his failure to remove Saddam Hussein.896

The signatories to the PNAC’s statement of principles represented a broad cross

section of neo-conservatives,897 many of whom had held national security

positions under either Reagan or George H. W. Bush. The group included Dick

892 Charles Krauthammer, “The New Unilateralism,” Washington Post, 8 June 2001, A29. 893 William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Reject the Global Buddy System,” New York Times, 25 October 1999. 894 Kristol and Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” 19. 895 Ibid., 27–8. 896 Robert Kagan, “Ticking Legacies,” Washington Post, 5 November 2000. 897 For the full list of signatories, see John Feffer, Power Trip: U.S. Unilateralism and Global Strategy after September 11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 205–9.

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Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (Secretaries of Defense under the elder Bush and

Gerald Ford respectively).

As early as 1997, individuals who became key figures in the Bush administration

– Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, John

Bolton, Douglas Feith, and ‘Scooter’ Libby – had signed on to the vision of U.S.

primacy laid out by William Kristol in “Project for a New American Century.”898

The objectives were:

(1) we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;

(2) we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;

(3) we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad.

(4) we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.899

Some scholars have explicitly attempted to locate the birth of neoconservatism’s

unipolarity in the 1990s with the PNAC.900 Yet the goal of achieving American

predominance did not originate during the presidency of George H. W. Bush.

It is important to examine the evolution of neoconservative thought to elucidate

its complex relationship with the American liberal ideology in response to which

neoconservatism was formed, otherwise neoconservative beliefs about foreign

policy are open to misinterpretation. Neoconservatism emerged as a response to

the rise of the ‘New Left’ in late 1960s and early 1970s America.901 It was a

specific response to the loss of authority which neoconservatives believed the

state had suffered at the hands of limitless demands for democratisation from the

898 William Kristol, “Project for a New American Century” (3 June 1997), http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm [accessed 05/03/10]. 899 Ibid. 900 Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 1. 901 This account of the genesis of neoconservatism is based upon Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy; Drolet, American Neoconservatism; Michael Thompson, Confronting the New Conservatism: The Rise of the Right in America (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Vaïsse, Neoconservatism; Michael C. Williams, “What Is the National Interest? The Neoconservative Challenge in IR Theory,” European Journal of International Relations, 11, no. 3 (2005): 307–37.

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Left. As Joshua Muravchik described it, “The left drove us from the Democratic

Party, stole the ‘liberal’ label, and successfully affixed to us the name

‘neoconservative’.”902 The point of tracing these roots is that it reveals

neoconservatism not as ‘liberal conservatism’ but as a school of thought which is

“is in fact ferociously predatory on liberal values – both in domestic and global

politics.”903 In other words, neoconservatives are not the heirs of Wilson, and

were not resorting to power politics to pursue a liberal agenda with the intention

of deepening the normative fabric of global liberal order. In fact:

neoconservative attachments to liberalism are predicated on an atavistic conservative philosophy which is at the service of values – authority, hierarchy, elitism, nationalism, community, sacrifice – that are inimical to the transformative mechanisms of liberal governance and the progressive discourse of democracy and human rights.904

Instead, neoconservatives envisage democracy promotion as the establishment, by

force, of a set of institutions and electoral mechanisms designed to transform the

‘deficient’ political culture of the targeted states and to manufacture consent from

above for “an externally imposed neoliberal-political-economic infrastructure.”905

Democracy promotion here is “an identity conferring strategy of statecraft

designed to make the international system safe for American hegemony in a world

that is and will always be characterized by war, violence and geopolitical

rivalry.”906 The type of ‘democracy’ promoted by neoconservatism is polyarchic,

based on competing elites battling for the votes of a largely passive electorate.907

The ‘top down’ basis of polyarchic democracy explains why it has not been

successful when exported to other countries. Polyarchic democracy delegitimises

the bottom-up struggle of civil society, removing the transformative potential of

democracy and lacking legitimacy in the eyes of the people who are meant to be

the beneficiaries.

This distinction with Wilsonianism is key, because this type of understanding of

neoconservatism and what neoconservatives mean by ‘democracy promotion’

902 Joshua Muravchik, “Operation Comeback,” Foreign Policy, no. 157 (2006): 64. 903 Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 7. 904 Ibid. 905 Drolet, “A Liberalism Betrayed?” 100. 906 Ibid. 907 Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 138–9.

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fundamentally alters any recreation of the Bush Doctrine as an ideological

intervention in the discourse of exceptionalism.

Neoconservatism had been a significant element in foreign-policy debate since the

Nixon–Kissinger era of détente, but scholars of that era have overlooked its

relevance because that era’s neoconservatives did not strongly influence foreign

policy.908 It was in neoconservative critiques of détente that the ideological

antecedents of the Bush Doctrine have their roots. Henry Jackson launched a

multi-faceted attack on détente in which his most important points were, first, that

détente downplayed the importance of human rights within the Soviet Union; and,

second, that peace and security “depend not on a balance of power, but on a

certain imbalance of power favourable to the defenders of peace – in which the

strength of the peace keeper is greater than that of the peace upsetter.”909 This was

a premise which resurfaced in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance910 and 1993

Regional Defense Strategy.911 The assumption was that stability was a product not

of a constructed global balance of power but of the presence of a militarily

preponderant power capable of halting the ambitions of both regional and global

aggressors. Jackson’s ideas found considerable support in the pages of

Commentary. Theodore Draper questioned whether it was actually the case “that

the danger of war arises if one nation becomes infinitely more powerful than

others?”912 Norman Podhoretz worried that the opening to China would allow

America to “rely on the China card as an excuse for failing to build up our own

power.”913 This latter view was still echoed by Paul Wolfowitz twenty years after

Podhoretz.914

George W. Bush’s administration included neoconservative policymakers, but the

foreign-policy elite had included neoconservatives for at least several decades, as

908 This has in part been rectified: see Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy, 38–9. 909 Henry Jackson quoted in Robert Gordon Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2000), 139. 910 U.S. Department of Defense, “Defense Planning Guidance, FY 1994–1999.” 911 U.S. Department of Defense, “Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy.” 912 Theodore Draper, “Détente,” Commentary (June 1974), 29. 913 Norman Podhoretz, “The Present Danger,” Commentary (March 1980), 39. 914 Paul Wolfowitz, “Statesmanship and the New Century,” in Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, ed. Robert Kagan and William Kristol (San Francisco, Calif.: Encounter Books, 2000), 328.

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this thesis has already illustrated. The presence of neoconservative ideas did not

make their ultimate dominance in the post-9/11 Bush Doctrine inevitable and

during the 1990s neoconservatism was in fact widely considered dead.915

Justin Vaïsse has identified the mid-1990s as the beginning of the third age of

neoconservatism. During this period, neoconservatives became a mainstream,

albeit weak, part of the Republican party.916 Some third-age neoconservatives saw

the promotion of democracy as inextricably linked to the containment of

Communism and therefore saw a reduced role for U.S. involvement in post-Cold

War international affairs.917 However, many third-age neoconservatives rejected

this view as dangerously close to the type of realpolitik that had led to détente.918

Ben Wattenberg spoke for them when he asked “Doesn’t the spread of democracy

enhance our national interest? . . . As the last superpower we should try to shape

evolution.”919 Elsewhere, Wattenberg referred to the United States as the “first

universal nation.”920 For this group of neoconservatives the Cold War had been

primarily ideological; the defence of American democracy had been

containment’s central tenet. Similarly, in his 1991 book Exporting Democracy:

Fulfilling America’s Destiny, Joshua Muravchik suggested that the way to create a

“favorable environment” for the United States was to encourage the proliferation

of democratic regimes because democratic peace theory had confirmed that the

more democratic the world, the more peaceful.921

Michael Ledeen’s Freedom Betrayed: How America Led a Global Democratic

Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away appeared in 1996.922

915 See Norman Podhoretz, “Neoconservatism a Eulogy,” Commentary (March 1996), http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/neoconservatism-a-eulogy/ [accessed 05/03/10]; Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York; London: Free, 1995), xi; Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 200. 916 Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 220–21. 917 Irving Kristol, “In Search of Our National Interest,” The Wall Street Journal, 7 June 1990; Kirkpatrick, “A Normal Country in a Normal Time”; Nathan Glazer, “A Time for Modesty,” in America’s Purpose: New Visions of U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. Owen Harries (San Francisco, Calif.: ICS Press, 1991). 918 In fact the Fall 1990 issue of The National Interest was devoted to the debate between the two camps, and the books in the previous footnote, as well as Wattenberg’s essay in the following footnote, were expanded from essays in that issue. 919 Ben J. Wattenberg, “Neo-Manifest Destinarianism,” in America’s Purpose: New Visions of U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. Owen Harries (San Francisco, Calif.: ICS Press, 1991), 107–13. 920 Wattenberg, The First Universal Nation. 921 Muravchik, Exporting Democracy, 8. 922 Michael A. Ledeen, Freedom Betrayed: How America Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1996).

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Muravchik followed with The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge

to Neo-Isolationism.923 Both books asserted that the United States had a special

responsibility. The nation would betray its universalist values if it did not

intervene, especially in the Balkans, to enforce respect for human rights, defend

democracy, and shape the world in its own image. In his 1999 tract Tyranny’s

Ally,924 David Wurmser pushed to the limit the idea of betrayal of U.S. values and

complicity with dictatorial regimes. If the United States had the means to

overthrow a tyrant – in this case, Saddam Hussein – and did not do so, it was an

ally of tyranny.

The immediate post-Cold War context of U.S. grand strategy was the debate

about the new world order. The Clinton years had failed to decisively answer

what America’s role in that order would be, and the debate still raged at the end of

the 1990s. Charles Krauthammer spent most of the 1990s attacking Clinton, yet

he enthused “America bestrides the world like a colossus.”925 Krauthammer

expected this ‘unipolar moment’ of U.S. hegemony to last for at least a

generation, although he warned that the laws of history, especially with respect to

international politics, “cannot be defied forever.”926

Krauthammer differed from other neoconservatives in recommending that the

United States use military intervention to spread democracy only when vital U.S.

interests were at stake.927 By his measure, U.S. military intervention in the

Balkans had not met this criterion, whereas other neoconservatives had clamoured

for such intervention in Bosnia and then Kosovo.928 For Krauthammer, it was fine

to declare, as President George W. Bush had done, that the United States was

prepared to put an end to tyranny everywhere, but the nation should act on that

923 Muravchik, The Imperative of American Leadership. 924 David Wurmser, Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1999). 925 Charles Krauthammer, “A Second American Century?” TIME, 27 December 1999, 186. 926 Ibid. 927 He called this “democratic realism”; see Charles Krauthammer, Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World, Irving Kristol Lecture (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 2004). 928 Richard Perle, Eugene Rostow, and Paul Wolfowitz had suggested via the Action Council for Peace in the Balkans that failure to intervene had made the U.N. irrelevant and even potentially complicit in the Balkan conflicts. See Halper and Clarke, America Alone, 92–4.

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intention only “where it counts”: in Krauthammer’s example, in Afghanistan and

Iraq but not in Liberia or Burma.929

In January 2000 Krauthammer espoused four strategic responsibilities for the next

administration: (1) deter and disarm rogue nations that acquired weapons of mass

destruction (WMD); (2) contain China; (3) guard against a revanchist Russia; and

(4) maintain order as the ultimate guarantor of world stability. The United States

was “the balancer of last resort in the world.”930 The nation required enormous

resources to maintain its vast military might and must be ready at all times to put

down rogue nations that no other country could subdue.

In the 1990s Congress increasingly wished to exploit the ‘peace dividend’,

whereas Cheney (then Secretary of Defense) and Wolfowitz (then Undersecretary

of Defense for Policy) worried about cuts to the military and sought to define a

military strategy for the post-Cold War period. In March 1992 the draft strategy

Defense Planning Guidance was leaked to the press. This document had

significant input from a wide range of neoconservative thinkers931 and stated that

the United States should maintain clear military superiority in order to discourage

any other nation from challenging U.S. world leadership. Although the document

never became policy and the administration attempted to distance itself from the

document, later versions showed only slightly more multilateral language. Cheney

authorised a mildly modified version entitled Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The

Regional Defense Strategy, in which strongly asserted hegemony nonetheless

remained a prominent theme.932

Defense Planning Guidance and Defense Strategy for the 1990s laid the

groundwork for the neoconservative approach to the post-Cold War era. The goal

was to prevent the emergence of a new rival comparable to the Soviet Union. To

that end, the United States would seek to prevent any other nation from

dominating any region. Cheney wrote, “Together with our allies, we must

preclude hostile nondemocratic powers from dominating regions critical to our

929 Krauthammer, Democratic Realism, 16, 19. 930 Charles Krauthammer, “A Symposium / American Power – For What?” Commentary (March 2000), 34–5. 931 See Chapter 6 of this thesis for the full details of the background to ‘DPG’; for the full list of contributors see Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 224. 932 U.S. Department of Defense, “Defense Strategy for the 1990s.”

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interests and otherwise work to build an international environment conducive to

our values,” a “peaceful democratic order in which nations are able to pursue their

legitimate interests without fear of military domination.”933 According to Cheney,

the United States could not depend solely on collective approaches to

international security. The nation would have to maintain the forces necessary to

act alone. Furthermore, “history suggests that effective multilateral action is most

likely to come about in response to U.S. leadership, not as an alternative to it.”934

In short, whenever the international community was divided the United States

would have to take the lead and its allies eventually would follow, more often in

the form of ad hoc coalitions than through the UN.

In the late 1990s Barry Posen and Andrew Ross sketched the four alternative

approaches to U.S. grand strategy which had the most support at the time:935 neo-

isolationism, selective engagement focused on maintaining peace, multilateralism,

and maintenance of U.S. primacy.936 A small band proposed the neo-isolationist

approach, but most of them avoided the term isolationism. Earl Ravenal and

Patrick Buchanan preferred the term disengagement,937 and Doug Bandow used

benign detachment.938 Only Eric Nordlinger embraced the term isolationism.939

Proponents of neo-isolationism advocated drastic reductions in the military

budget. The version of realism that underlay neo-isolationism had a very limited

strategic imperative at its core, based on the assumption that no country had the

power to threaten U.S. sovereignty.

Proponents of selective engagement focused on maintaining peace among the

nations with the most military and industrial power.940 During the 1990s only

China, Russia, Japan, and the European Union seemed capable of altering the

international order. According to advocates of peace-focused selective

engagement, the United States should concern itself with regional conflicts only if

933 Ibid., 2, 4. 934 Ibid., 6. 935 Posen and Ross, “Competing Visions.” 936 A similar taxonomy was used in Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 226. 937 Ravenal, “The Case for Adjustment”; Buchanan, “America First and Second, and Third.” 938 Bandow, “Keeping the Troops and the Money at Home.” 939 Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured. 940 Posen and Ross, “Competing Visions,” 17–23; Robert J. Art, “A Defensible Defense: America’s Grand Strategy after the Cold War,” International Security, 15, no. 4 (1991): 5–53; Ronald Steel, Temptations of a Superpower (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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they threatened the global equilibrium. Although this strategy would require a

substantial military budget, expenditures would be less than during the Cold War.

The greatest challenge to those who advocated this strategy was ‘mission creep’ –

the danger that the strategy would become one of primacy.941

Advocates of multilateralism (cooperative security) believed that peace was

effectively indivisible.942 Therefore, the United States had a significant national

interest in world peace and would act collectively through international

institutions as much as possible.943 Proponents of this view saw all nations as

interdependent. At the root of this interdependent world was a chain of logic

which connected the security of the U.S. and its more traditional allies to a host of

distant troubles; thus those distant troubles could not be ignored by the U.S.944

Proponents of a strategy centred on U.S. primacy focused on preventing the rise

of a peer power and maintaining U.S. hegemony by convincing other powers of

the purity of America’s intentions. As set forth in Defense Planning Guidance, in

this strategy the United States would seek to prevent the rise of challengers by

promoting international law, democracy, and free-market economics and

preventing the emergence of regional hegemons.

President Clinton had seemed to opt for multilateralism at the beginning of his

first term but then had shifted to a mix of selective engagement and primacy.945

The administration of the second President Bush made its distrust of nation-

building and humanitarian intervention abundantly clear. The George W. Bush

foreign-policy team wanted U.S. national-security policy to focus on great-power

politics and concrete national interests. The administration’s emphasis on the

selective use of force, the balancing of strategic commitments and military 941 Robert S. Chase et al. “Pivotal States and U.S. Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, 75, no. 1 (1996): 33–51. 942 Inis L. Claude, Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization (New York, Random House, 1971), 247; Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration. Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962), 183–4. 943 Ashton B. Carter et al., A New Concept of Cooperative Security (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1992); Janne E. Nolan, Global Engagement: Cooperation and Security in the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994). 944 Albright, Madeleine K., “Realism and Idealism in American Foreign Policy Today,” U.S. Department of State Dispatch, 5, no. 26 (27 June 1994): 434–7; Strobe Talbott, “Why NATO Should Grow,” New York Review of Books, 10 August 1995, 28–34. 945 John Dumbrell, “Was There a Clinton Doctrine? President Clinton’s Foreign Policy Reconsidered,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, 13, no. 2 (2002): 43–56.

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capability, and the avoidance of international social engineering was especially

visible in the Quadrennial Defense Review of 2001,946 which prioritised homeland

security and deterrence.947 The administration did not embrace a policy of rolling

back rogue nations and, as in the case of Iraq, took no aggressive action against

them. In 1999 Richard Haass articulated the then-dominance of foreign-policy

pragmatism when he wrote, “Order is more fundamental than justice.”948 Bush

appointees such as Powell, Rice, and Haass were openly sceptical of any sort of

crusading idealism in foreign affairs.949

Step two of contextual analysis: Bush’s ideological manoeuvre as a political

manoeuvre

The second step is concerned with identifying Bush’s ideological manoeuvre as a

political manoeuvre. This step seeks to place the Bush Doctrine in its practical

political context – that is, the practical political activity that the authors were

addressing and to which the strategy was a response.

As the previous section showed, before 9/11 Bush had laid out his vision of

American values but the administration did not have a coherent grand strategy;

“ABC” or “anything but Clinton”950 was the guiding mantra and Bush’s foreign

policy was cast in the broadest terms: the administration supported freedom, free

trade, and a strong defence.

At the start of Bush’s presidency the administration had no clear criteria for

investing political capital in foreign affairs. In the first eight months of Bush’s

presidency the White House indicated that it did not wish to continue business as

usual with North Korea and in the Middle East but failed to provide a good

alternative, creating a policy vacuum and receiving criticism from all sides.951

946 U.S. Department of Defense, “Quadrennial Defense Review” (30 September 2001), http://www.defense.gov/pubs/qdr2001.pdf [acccessed 05/03/11]. 947 Ibid., 6. 948 Richard N. Haass, “What to Do with American Primacy,” Foreign Affairs, 78, no. 5 (1999): 48. 949 Jacob Heilbrunn, “Condoleezza Rice: George W.’s Realist,” World Policy Journal, 16, no. 4 (1999): 50; Colin L. Powell and Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), 48–9, 62–71. 950 James Steinberg, “The Bush Foreign Policy Revolution,” New Perspectives Quarterly, 20, no. 3 (2003): 4–14. 951 Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound, 66; Alexander Moens, The Foreign Policy of George W. Bush: Values, Strategy and Loyalty (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 103.

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Bush had pitched his foreign policy and defence principles in terms of strong

values, but he had also called for a humble tone and attitude. In his inaugural

address of January 2001 he stated: “We will seek defenses beyond challenges, we

will confront weapons of mass destruction [and] shape a balance of power that

favors freedom.” He also stated, however: “We will show purpose without

arrogance.”952 The latter theme had often appeared in Bush’s campaign speeches,

in which Bush had spoken of “power exercised without swagger and influence

displayed without bluster.”953 By spring 2000 such words were largely forgotten:

America’s European allies were already complaining of feeling “bullied”954 and

Democrats picked up on this refrain, calling Bush “unilateralist.”955

The events of 9/11 marked a clear shift in Bush’s strategy and linguistic

constructions. Within hours of learning of the attacks on the World Trade Center,

Bush declared to his aides, “We’re at war.”956 Given how little information he had

at that point, his conclusion seemed rushed. Later the same day, as he was flying

above the burning Pentagon, Bush said, “That’s the 21st-century war you have

just witnessed.”957

The differences that had divided the United States from its allies before 9/11 gave

way to widespread solidarity and support. A 13 September editorial in the Left-

leaning French newspaper Le Monde declared, “Nous sommes tous Américains”

(“We are all Americans now”).958 Bush and his advisors interpreted the

international outpouring of sympathy as a mark that, as much as other countries

might dislike specific U.S. policies, they understood that the United States was a

just and beneficent power.959 It was an unusual interpretation; international

support was perhaps best symbolised by the first invocation of article 5 of the

952 Bush, “Inaugural Address.” 953 Bush, “A Period of Consequences.” 954 Evan Thomas and Roy Guttman, “See George. See George Learn Foreign Policy,” Newsweek, 18 June 2001, 2l; Carla Anne Robbins, “Allies at Odds: Behind U.S. Rift with Europeans,” Wall Street Journal, 27 March 2003, 1. 955 Roger Cohen, “America the Roughneck (Through Europe’s Eyes),” New York Times, 7 May 2001, A6. 956 George W. Bush, quoted in Bill Sammon, Fighting Back: The War on Terrorism from inside the Bush White House (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Pub., 2002), 94. 957 Ibid., 128. 958 “Nous Sommes Tous Américains.” Le Monde, 13 September 2001, 1. 959 Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound, 79.

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North Atlantic treaty, to come to the defence of fellow members under attack, not

to give blessing to ad hoc, U.S.-led intervention.

In his 9/11 Oval Office address Bush declared “We will make no distinction

between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,”960

and yet he had not yet decided what concrete action to take and which countries to

tackle first.961 In his 14 September speech in the National Cathedral he reached

out to Muslim Americans, and even liberal commentators expressed amazement at

his “Islamophilia.”962 Apparently, Bush realised that impugning or implicating

Islam might lead to a “clash of civilizations.” Instead, he placed 9/11 within a

larger ideological context: “Just three days removed from these events, Americans

do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already

clear; to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”963 In so doing Bush

depicted the conflict as not between competing interests or perspectives but

between good and evil. On 16 September he went so far as to call the war on

terrorism a “crusade.”964 By presenting the conflict in terms of moral absolutes,

Bush indicated what would be the overall thrust of U.S. foreign policy, even if

specific objectives remained as yet unclear.

Bush was quick to draw up specific responses to 9/11, and by 16 September he

gave Rice a point-by-point “war plan.”965 He endorsed the role of the Central

Intelligence Agency (CIA) as proposed by its director, George Tenet, and

approved domestic surveillance, urging the Pentagon to support the CIA in order

to “hit with all military options.”966 He also ordered a specific ultimatum to the

Taliban: to relinquish Osama Bin Laden or face military action.967 The next day,

960 George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the Terrorist Attacks” (11 September 2001), http:/www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=58057&st=&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11]. 961 James Carney and John F. Dickerson, “Inside the War Room,” TIME, 31 December 2001, 104. 962 Franklin Foer, “Blind Faith,” New Republic, 22 October 2001, 14. 963 George W. Bush, “Remarks at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance Service” (14 September 2001), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=63645&st=&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11]. 964 George W. Bush, “Remarks on Arrival at the White House and an Exchange With Reporters” (16 September 2001), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=63346&st=&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11]. 965 Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York; London: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 78. 966 George W. Bush, quoted in ibid., 98–9. 967 Ibid.

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he reconsidered military action in Iraq and discussed the issue with the full

National Security Council. Bush knew that Wolfowitz favoured removing

Saddam Hussein, but nonetheless stated “We have to be patient about Iraq.”968

Before 9/11, many critics in the United States and Europe had called Bush’s

foreign policy “unnerving unilateralism.”969 After the attacks, some thought he

had suddenly converted to multilateralism. On 19 September Bush prophetically

commented, “Two years from now only the Brits may be with us.”970 In reality,

both before and after 9/11, Bush’s idea of international cooperation was a

coalition of like-minded nations pursuing specific values and interests. As

expressed by Rumsfeld, “The mission must determine the coalition, and the

coalition must not determine the mission.”971 Despite the UN resolution

condemning the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and NATO’s invocation of

Article 5, the United States largely rejected offers of help from its allies, with the

notable exceptions of the United Kingdom and Australia with respect to waging

the Afghanistan War.

Within three weeks the Bush presidency had turned from a domestic focus to a

focus on a global war against terrorism. In December 2001 Bush announced that

the United States was withdrawing from the ABM Treaty. The White House

blocked international efforts to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. In

additon, throughout 2002 the Bush administration intensified its campaign to

block the International Criminal Court from having jurisdiction over U.S. citizens.

When Bush spoke at the Citadel on 11 December 2001 he stated that “a few evil

men”972 intended to use WMD to threaten civilisation. “Our military has a new

and essential mission,”973 he said. “For states that support terror, it’s not enough

968 George W. Bush, quoted in Woodward, Bush at War, 107. 969 The Economist, “Seeing the World Anew: September 11th Changed the Way America, Its Friends and Its Rivals Think About Foreign Policy,” The Economist, 25 October 2001, 19. 970 George W. Bush, quoted in Woodward, Bush at War, 106. 971 U.S. Department of Defense, “Transcript: Rumsfeld Urges NATO To Prepare For New Threats” (1 October 2001), http://usinfo.org/wf-archive/2001/011218/epf207.htm [accessed 05/03/11]. 972 George W. Bush, “Remarks at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina” (11 December 2001), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=73494&st=&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11]. 973 Ibid.

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that the consequences be costly – they must be devastating.”974 In his State of the

Union address in January 2002 he made clear the fundamental political reordering

that his emerging doctrine would advance.975 He used the speech to reset the

boundaries of U.S. grand strategy. Conceptually and linguistically, Bush moved

the target from the sponsors of terrorism to the sponsors of the next weapons of

terrorism. The new strategy became preventing these weapons from coming into

terrorist hands, and the idea of pre-emption flowed from the idea of prevention.

This was a critical turning point and, after the Taliban refused to hand over Bin

Laden, the Bush administration launched military action in Afghanistan. This step

indicated a more aggressive approach to counterterrorism than under Clinton, but

it had broad public support, congressional backing, and extensive international

support.976 Given that the Taliban had supported the orchestrators of the worst

terrorist attack in U.S. history and then refused to hand them over, the U.S.

response was predictable.

Within the United States the war in Afghanistan was initially viewed as a major

success after the swift transfer of control to the International Security Assistance

Force in December 2001. The war did not trigger immediate public debate over

the basic outlines of U.S. grand strategy. However, the question remained: How

will overall U.S. national-security policy be reshaped in response to 9/11? The

available options were basically the same as they had been since the end of the

Cold War.977 The United States could completely disengage from its alliances and

military deployments overseas; deepen its commitment to multilateralism;

prioritise its vital interests, playing down democracy promotion; or adopt an

aggressive form of U.S. primacy. As Bush’s Citadel and State of the Union

speeches made clear, Bush saw the conflict with a personal moral clarity and he

translated that purpose into strategy. America’s military posture would now be

offensive.

974 Ibid. 975 George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union” (29 January 2002), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29644&st=&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11]. 976 Leonie Huddy et al., “Trends: Reactions to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, 66, no. 3 (2002): 423–4. 977 Colin Dueck, “Ideas and Alternatives in American Grand Strategy,” Review of International Studies, 30, no. 4 (2004): 529.

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Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union Address caused major controversy. In it,

he named the three countries that he regarded as forming an “axis of evil” that

was “threatening the peace of the world”: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.978 Some

European commentators dismissed Bush’s moral stance as evidence of his

“relative ignorance” of the outside world.979 Originally, Bush’s speechwriter,

David Frum, wrote “axis of hatred”, not “axis of evil”, and it seems unlikely that

Bush or his advisors anticipated that “axis of evil” would become the speech’s

hallmark.980 After all, Bush regularly used the word evil. Nor was the meaning of

‘axis’ clear. To Frum, the term drew an analogy between the former threat of the

Second World War Axis powers (Japan, Nazi Germany, and fascist Italy) and the

current threat of the anti-American nations of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; it was

not intended to suggest homogeneity of issues.981 However, Press Secretary Ari

Fleischer asserted that Bush had intended “no comparison” to the Axis powers of

the Second World War. According to Fleischer, the use of the term axis was more

“rhetorical than historical.”982 Bush seldom repeated the phrase “axis of evil”, as

the press focus on it had obscured the speech’s actual declaration of strategy: “I

will not wait on events. . . . I will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes

to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”983

The scale of Bush’s political act was substantial; in the second part of the address,

he tried to recast the entire economic and domestic debate in terms of the new

national-security environment. Bush linked the war on terrorism to what he

termed “economic security”984 and ended the address with talk of values, extolling

the volunteerism and self-sacrifice that people had demonstrated in the aftermath

of the 9/11 attacks as showing “what a new culture of responsibility could look

like.”985 Bush added to his “new culture of responsibility” seven global and “non-

negotiable demands of human dignity,” including respect for women and religious 978 Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union” (29 January 2002). 979 Hassner, “The United States,” 38. 980 David Frum, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Random House, 2003), 238. 981 Ibid., 235. 982 Ari Fleischer, quoted in David E. Sanger, “A Nation Challenged: The Rogue List; Bush Aides Say Tough Tone Put Foes on Notice,” New York Times, 31 January 2002, A1. 983 Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union” (29 January 2002). 984 Ibid. 985 Ibid.

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tolerance.986 With a rhetorical flourish worthy of his idol, Abraham Lincoln, Bush

announced his political programme: “Steadfast in our purpose, we now press on.

We have known freedom’s price, we have shown freedom’s power [and] we will

see freedom’s victory.”987

Step three of contextual analysis: the Bush Doctrine as an ideological move

Step three of Skinnerian contextual analysis involves identifying ideologies and

examining how they form, are criticised, and change. In this chapter, step three

will consist of an analysis of the Bush Doctrine as an ideological move,

discussing the degree to which Bush’s international strategy was conventional and

the nature of its ideological innovation, if any. The analysis will identify the point

at which ideological reinforcement or change was attempted and the political

reasons for the attempt.

The Bush Doctrine took some time to take definitive form and as a result

Krauthammer was hasty in characterising the Bush Doctrine as “soft

unilateralism.”988 After 9/11, the Bush administration determined that U.S.

strategy should not distinguish between terrorists and the nations that harboured

them. Still later, the administration saw U.S. strategy as focused on pre-emptive

war or regime change. Ultimately, the Bush Doctrine was based on using U.S.

power to promote a specific form of democracy in the Middle East in order to

bring stability to the region.989

This section will examine Krauthammer’s assertion that the “The Bush doctrine

is, essentially a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy”990 and, in doing so,

will extract the underlying elements of the Bush Doctrine and identify it as an

ideological move.

The Bush Doctrine’s first ostensible pillar was the belief that democratic regimes

do not seek war. Therefore, promoting democracy could potentially bring about

international stability. In 2002 Bush stated “Free societies do not intimidate

986 Ibid. 987 Ibid. 988 Charles Krauthammer, “The Bush Doctrine,” Washington Post, 4 May 2001, A25. 989 Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 244. 990 Charles Krauthammer, “The Neoconservative Convergence,” Commentary (July/August 2005), 21–6.

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through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with

mass murder.”991 The next year he similarly stated “The world has a clear interest

in the spread of democratic values because stable and free nations do not breed the

ideologies of murder.”992

John Mearsheimer described the neoconservative Bush Doctrine as

“Wilsonianism with teeth” because “the theory has an idealist strand and a power

strand: Wilsonianism provides the idealism, an emphasis on military power

provides the teeth.”993 The belief that the spread of liberal values and democratic

institutions abroad advanced America’s economic and security interests had a

long pedigree and had last been prominent during the Clinton presidency.994

However, as this chapter has already asserted, the link between Wilsonianism and

neoconservatism is inaccurate and gives an incorrect sense of neoconservative

foreign-policy aims. Whilst neoconservatives repeatedly and forcefully called for

democracy promotion, their vision of democracy was polyarchic. At heart

neoconservatism was a domestic critique of American democracy’s ‘betrayal’ by

liberalism in the 1960s. The neoconservative response was in part to adopt a

Schumpterian model of polyarchic democracy995 and repackage what was

essentially an authoritarian European model of government “in order to make it

palatable to an American audience.”996 Ronald Reagan, however, fused this notion

991 George W. Bush, “Address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City” (12 September 2002), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64069&st=mass+murder&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11]. 992 George W. Bush, “Remarks at the American Enterprise Institute Dinner” (26 February 2003), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62953&st=ideologies+of+murder&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11]. 993 John Mearsheimer, “Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq war: realism versus neo-conservatism,” OpenDemocracy (18 May 2005), http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-americanpower/morgenthau_2522.jsp [accessed 05/03/11]. 994 Michael Cox et al., American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Layne, The Peace of Illusions, 109, 112, 114. 995 Seymour Martin Lipset and Jason M. Lakin (The Democratic Century [Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004], 19–20) state that “this is a minimalist definition of democracy inspired by Joseph Schumpeter’s classic elitist conception of democracy.” 996 Willam E. Scheuerman, “Carl Schmitt and the Origins of Joseph Schumpeter’s Theory of Democratic Elitism,” in Carl Schmitt: The End of Law, ed. William E. Scheuerman (Lanham, Md; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 201.

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of the promotion of an authoritarian form of democracy abroad with the American

exceptionalist tradition.997

In its embrace with neoconservatism, the Bush Doctrine encompassed a particular

and novel notion of polyarchic democracy and emphasised its promotion in U.S.

exceptionalist discourse. This gave comments such as Krauthammer’s a particular

meaning: “With the decline of communism, the advancement of democracy

should become the touchstone of a new ideological American foreign policy.”998

Although neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama had seemed to assume a

steady and irreversible march toward democracy in the early 1990s, Bush was

much more proactive about the spread of democracy. In suggesting that the mere

existence of antipathetic regimes threatened the United States, the Bush Doctrine

echoed NSC-68.

The Iraq War illustrated Bush’s line of reasoning. If the Middle East became

democratic, America’s security problem in the region, terrorism, and the

proliferation of WMD would ultimately stop. Hence, it was essential to transform

the Middle East. Regime change in Iraq would start a chain reaction. Bush stated:

“A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of

freedom for other nations in the region.”999

In his preface to the 2002 Strategy of the United States of America, Bush espoused

the universal applicability of American values:

The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom – and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. . . . [The] values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society.1000

The belief in a universal desire for freedom was not new to U.S. grand strategy or

to President Bush. In his inaugural address Bush had stated “Democratic faith is

more than the creed of our country, it is the inborn hope of our humanity, an ideal 997 Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 138–9; William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 56, 76–7, 91–8, 328. 998 Charles Krauthammer, “Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World,” The National Interest (1989/1990), 47. 999 Bush, “Remarks at the American Enterprise Institute Dinner”. 1000 George W. Bush, Preface to White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States,” 3.

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we carry, . . . a trust we bear and pass along.”1001 After 9/11, Bush became more

certain of America’s proselytising role and it translated into his rhetoric: “Liberty

and justice . . . are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere.”1002

Although Bush was at pains to avoid cultural imperialism, he vowed to “stand

firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on

the power of the state; respect for women; private property; free speech; equal

justice; and religious tolerance.”1003 The language makes clear that Bush regarded

these values as universal. Therefore, in his view Americans were not imposing

their values but helping other peoples realise their thymotic impulse.

Neoconservativism was not concerned with spreading ‘universal values’ for their

own sake but in order to guarantee U.S. security.

The view that the spread of democracy must be a feature of U.S. grand strategy

had not been so forcefully expressed since NSC-68. Bush lamented his belief that

“sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom

in the Middle East”1004 had allowed authoritarian regimes to survive and

ultimately given rise to terrorism:

Some who call themselves realists question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality: America has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat; America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.1005

The purpose of the spread of ‘democracy’ could not be any clearer; the Bush

Doctrine was based on the notion that the United States was the sole superpower

and should seek to preserve its hegemony indefinitely and this was in part based

upon the spread of a particular version of democracy. In a West Point speech of

June 2002 Bush stated “America has and intends to keep, military strength beyond

1001 Bush, “Inaugural Address.” 1002 Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union” (29 January 2002). 1003 Ibid. 1004 George W. Bush, “Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy” (6 November 2003), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=844&st=&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11]. 1005 George W. Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado” (2 June 2003), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.phppid=72640&st=&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11].

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challenge – thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless,

and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.”1006

The National Security Strategy built upon this conception of hegemonic stability.

The strategy declared that Americans “must build and maintain our defenses

beyond challenge,”1007 and also stated that “Our forces will be strong enough to

dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of

surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States.”1008

Third-age neoconservatives viewed U.S. omnipotence and leadership as a

prerequisite for an orderly, peaceful world. William Kristol and Robert Kagan

stated “American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of

peace and international order.”1009 In other words, a preponderance of American

power was viewed by neoconservatives as beneficial to both the United States and

the rest of the world and, according to Robert Jervis, a commitment to U.S.

primacy was the unifying theme of all elements of the Bush Doctrine.1010 As this

chapter has shown, this theme was present in neoconservative thought long before

Bush became president; his innovation was to fuse American preponderance with

a specific form of democracy promotion in a mutually reinforcing pattern and to

do so within exceptionalist discourse.

In advocating U.S. hegemony, neoconservatives expressed their antipathy to

traditional balance-of-power politics. They viewed a U.S.-led hegemonic order as

superior to a balance-of-power order. Whereas many realists view a balance of

power as a prescription for peace, neoconservatives view it as an unnecessary

hindrance to U.S. interests.1011

1006 George W. Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York” (1 June 2002), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=62730&st=&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11]. 1007 White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States,” 32. 1008 Ibid., 30. 1009 Kristol and Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” 23. 1010 Robert Jervis, “Understanding the Bush Doctrine,” in American Hegemony: Preventive War, Iraq, and Imposing Democracy, ed. Demetrios Caraley (New York: Academy of Political Science, 2004),14. 1011 Brian Schmidt and Michael Williams, “The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives Versus Realists,” Security Studies, 17, no. 2 (2008): 196.

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Mearsheimer argues that the underlying logic of neoconservatism is

“bandwagoning.”1012 According to this logic, weaker nations join forces with a

more powerful one rather than attempt to check its power. In this view, American

power is a force for democratisation that will be universally supported by nations

able to provide support. As expressed by Michael Williams, “Bandwagoning, in

this sense, is seen as a moral–political process as well as a military–strategic

calculation.”1013

The Bush Doctrine was committed to using preemptive military force when

necessary. This aspect of the doctrine was one of the most controversial. Most of

the voluminous literature on the subject argues for or against pre-emption.1014 It

does not examine why the Bush administration elevated pre-emption (which had

always been an option for the United States) to doctrinal status after 9/11. As

Jonathan Renshon comments, “The core of this issue is why this policy, and why

now?”1015 A related question is “Why did the Bush administration define

preemption as it did?”

The Bush administration did not need a formal definition of pre-emption to drive

home the point that the nexus between WMD, rogue nations, and terrorists posed

the greatest threat to U.S. national security. As the Clinton administration had

done, the Bush administration could have reserved pre-emption for rogue nations

without highlighting that policy. The Bush administration also could have

reserved pre-emption for rare situations in which inaction posed a credible risk of

large, irreversible harm and other policy tools offered a poor prospect of success.

In fact, pre-emption fitted with neoconservative ideology. Pre-emption in the

Bush Doctrine can be viewed as an exercise in compelling rogue nations to

1012 Mearsheimer, “Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq War,” 2. 1013 Schmidt and Williams, “The Bush Doctrine,” 196. 1014 Gaddis, “A Grand Strategy of Transformation”; John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2004); Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Era,” in The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire, ed. Andrew J. Bacevich (Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2003); Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound; Robert Jervis, “Understanding the Bush Doctrine,” Political Science Quarterly, 118, no. 3 (2003): 365–88; Michael Cox, “Empire, Imperialism and the Bush Doctrine,” Review of International Studies, 30, no. 4 (2004): 585–608; Dueck, “Ideas and Alternatives in American Grand Strategy.” 1015 Jonathan Renshon, “The Psychological Origins of Preventive War,” in Understanding the Bush Doctrine: Psychology and Strategy in an Age of Terrorism, ed. Stanley Allen Renshon and Peter Suedfeld (New York; London: Routledge, 2007), 201.

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behave in accordance with U.S. policy objectives and thus in furthering American

security interests. By highlighting pre-emption, the administration explicitly

warned rogue nations of the consequences of pursuing WMD and ties to

terrorism. Secretary of State Powell stated that the purpose of pre-emption was

“putting the leaders of [some] countries on notice that the potential costs of their

opportunism had just gone way up.”1016

Launching the war in Iraq was central to this use of pre-emption. The war would

give credibility to the threat of pre-emptive action against other nations believed

to have WMD. For military and political reasons, the United States could not use

force against Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The invasion of Iraq signalled a new

American will commensurate with the nation’s renewed military capacity. In the

late 1990s many in Washington, including those within the Bush administration,

believed that U.S. credibility had significantly weakened since the end of the Cold

War despite the country’s political and military dominance.1017 After 9/11, issuing

threats and making limited use of military power was perceived to merely

continue the Clinton administration’s policies. The preservation of U.S. primacy

required both actual and perceived military strength. Thus, the logic of primacy

lay behind the Bush Doctrine’s formulation of pre-emption. In addition to

promoting deterrence, pre-emption reflected the neoconservative worldview.

The Bush Doctrine was clearly unilateralist. A commitment to pre-emption and to

maintaining a unipolar international system is unilateralist to the core. It is

extremely difficult to obtain a consensus on the pre-emptive use of force. Indeed,

the UN Security Council would not authorise U.S. military action against Iraq.

Neoconservatives had criticised not only President Clinton’s failure to remove

Saddam Hussein from power but also his multilateral approach to foreign

policy.1018 According to neoconservatives, a nation with primacy has the option of

acting unilaterally.

The Bush Doctrine did not treat international cooperation as inherently desirable.

The Bush administration disregarded the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto

1016 Colin L. Powell, “A Strategy of Partnerships,” Foreign Affairs, 83, no. 1 (2004): 23. 1017 Barry M. Blechman and Tamara Cofman Wittes, “Defining Moment: The Threat and Use of Force in American Foreign Policy.” Political Science Quarterly, 114, no. 1 (1999): 1–30. 1018 Paul D. Wolfowitz, “Clinton’s First Year,” Foreign Affairs, 73, no. 1 (1994): 28–44.

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Protocol, and other treaties, and apparently shared neorealist scepticism that

international institutions and treaties could reliably deliver security.1019 The Bush

administration’s view of international cooperation was by no means ideologically

innovative; it was consistent with much U.S. foreign-policy history. As expressed

by John Lewis Gaddis, a ‘unilateralist turn’ after the Cold War and 9/11 “reflects

a return to an old position not the emergence of a new one.”1020

The neoconservative position was most distinctive with respect to the implications

of U.S. primacy. To many neoconservatives, U.S. primacy signified a

responsibility to intervene in humanitarian crises, especially genocide. Compared

to liberal-institutionalists, neoconservatives tended to be quicker to endorse

forceful intervention (if possible, multilateral intervention), especially when

international institutions seemed ineffective.1021

This section has identified the ideological components of the Bush Doctrine and

demonstrated its roots in neoconservative thought. The doctrine included a strong

ideological vein of nationalism. Indeed, neoconservatism appeals to what Walter

Lippmann identified as the “persistent evangel in Americanism.”1022 This

evangelism appears in Bush’s contention that the United States represents the

“single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free

enterprise.”1023 In this view, promotion of democracy is inextricably linked to

U.S. identity. Bush stated as much in his speech at the 2004 Republican National

Convention: “Our nation’s founding commitment is still our deepest commitment:

In our world, and here at home, we will extend the frontiers of freedom.”1024 Bush

insisted that “the United States is the beacon for freedom in the world” and that he

1019 Gerard Alexander, “International Relations Theory Meets World Politics: The Neoconservative Vs. Realism Debate,” in Understanding the Bush Doctrine: Psychology and Strategy in an Age of Terrorism, ed. Stanley Allen Renshon and Peter Suedfeld (New York; London: Routledge, 2007), 53. 1020 Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, 26. 1021 William Kristol and Vance Serchuk, “End the Genocide Now,” Washington Post, 22 September 2004, A31. 1022 Walter Lippmann, U.S. War Aims (London: Hamilton, 1944), 40. 1023 George W. Bush, Preface to White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States,” 3. 1024 George W. Bush, “Remarks Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in New York City” (2 September 2004), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=72727&st=&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11].

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had “a responsibility to promote freedom that is as solemn as the responsibility [to

protect] the American people, because the two go hand in hand.”1025

Step four: the Bush Doctrine and the alteration of political vocabulary

Step four of Skinnerian contextual analysis addresses the question ‘What relation

between political ideology and political action best explains the diffusion of

certain ideologies, and what effect does this have on political behaviour?’ As

discussed in previous chapters, political vocabulary includes normative terms that

may be altered to advance a political agenda.

In his preface to the 2002 National Security Strategy Bush specified three goals of

his administration: “We will defend the peace against the threats from terrorists

and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the

great powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on

every continent.”1026 In comparison, the three goals that the Clinton

administration put forth in the 1999 National Security Strategy were “To enhance

America’s security. To bolster America’s economic prosperity. To promote

democracy and human rights abroad.”1027 Whereas the Bush objectives involved

defending, preserving, and extending peace, the Clinton objectives were based on

the premise of peace. Unlike the Bush administration, the Clinton administration

did not explicitly call for cooperation amongst great powers. The Bush

administration’s language of “encouraging” democratic societies “on every

continent” was considerably more forceful than the Clinton administration’s

language of “promoting” democracy and human rights “abroad.”1028

In an innovative move that was surely a response to 9/11, the Bush document

equated terrorists with tyrants as sources of danger. The document noted that U.S.

strategy in the past had concentrated on defence against tyrants. The Cold War

strategies of containment and deterrence had assumed a threat from identifiable

regimes operating from identifiable territories. The threat of terrorism could not

be similarly located. The events of 9/11 had shown that terrorists could inflict a

1025 George W. Bush, quoted in Woodward, Bush at War, 89. 1026 George W. Bush, quoted in White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States,” 7. 1027 White House, “A National Security Strategy For A New Century” (September 1999), http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/nss/nssr-1299.pdf [accessed 05/03/11], 3. 1028 Ibid.

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level of destruction that only nations wielding conventional military power had

previously achieved. The document stated “Today, our enemies see weapons of

mass destruction as weapons of choice.”1029 For the Bush administration, terrorists

and tyrants were comparable in their ability to inflict mass destruction. The logic

of the document suggests that this was why the option of pre-emption had to be

added to those of containment and deterrence. However, the final section

suggested that deterrence was also an implicit strategic consideration in the Bush

Doctrine.

In the 2002 National Security Strategy the White House was careful to specify a

legal basis for pre-emption: international law recognised that “nations need not

suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against

forces that present an imminent danger of attack.”1030 The administration argued

that terrorism, rogue nations, and WMD required a new response, the use of

preventive force. Deterrence and containment had sufficed during the Cold War,

but they were unsuitable against enemies without territory or people to defend:

Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today’s threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first. . . . Traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents; whose so-called soldiers seek martyrdom in death and whose most potent protection is statelessness. The overlap between states that sponsor terror and those that pursue WMD compels us to action. . . . [T]he United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.1031

Although the document repeatedly referred to “preemption” it actually made a

case for preventive action, which is very different with regard to imminence.1032 If

the United States took action against a hostile nation that had just pointed missiles

at it and was clearly about to attack, the U.S. action would be pre-emptive. In

contrast, if the United States took action against a nation that was considered

hostile, was building its military, and might or might not direct force against the 1029 White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States,” 19. 1030 Ibid.,19. 1031 Ibid. 1032 Antony J. Blinken, “From Preemption to Engagement,” Survival – Global Politics and Strategy, 45, no. 4 (2003): 34–5.

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United States at some future date, the U.S. action would be preventive. The

threshold for preventive action is much higher than for pre-emptive action.1033

The Bush National Security Strategy, however, conflated pre-emption and

prevention:

Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat – most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack. We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.1034

The document indicated that pre-emptive action did not require imminent threat.

Instead of being defined in terms of imminence (i.e., specificity and certainty),

threat was defined mainly in terms of potential, the adversary’s capabilities, and

its hostile attitude. The Bush National Security and Strategy stated:

We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. . . . The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.1035

The Bush Doctrine reset the theoretical baseline for pre-emptive military action

but did not offer clear criteria for actually engaging in such action.1036 Although

both ‘preemption’ and ‘prevention’ appeared throughout the document, they were

not used interchangeably. In the course of the document, ‘preemption’ was

gradually detached from the justificatory context of international law and

normalised. This was an unusual step to take. In the past, the United States had

sometimes strongly considered or even used pre-emptive action. For example, in

1994 the Clinton administration had considered pre-emptive strikes against North

Korea’s uranium-enrichment facilities,1037 and in 1998 it had struck what it

believed to be a chemical weapons plant in Sudan. However, no administration

1033 Jack S. Levy, “Preventive War and the Bush Doctrine: Theoretical Logic and Historical Roots,” in Understanding the Bush Doctrine: Psychology and Strategy in an Age of Terrorism, ed. Stanley Allen Renshon and Peter Suedfeld (New York; London: Routledge, 2007), 178–80; Hakan Tunç, "Preemption in the Bush Doctrine: A Reappraisal." Foreign Policy Analysis 5, no. 1 (2009): 1-16. 1034 White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States,” 19. 1035 Ibid. 1036 Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound, 125. 1037 Robert Litwak, Regime Change: U.S. Strategy through the Prism of 9/11 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 59–60.

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before the Bush presidency had publicly highlighted pre-emption. Through The

National Security Strategy and presidential speeches, the administration presented

pre-emption as a crucial strategic option in the ‘war on terror’. Despite this,

Elainne Bunn suggested that “Pre-emption is not a new option. U.S. officials have

contemplated preemptive military actions against WMD several times, usually

without taking action. What is new is open discussion of pre-emption.”1038 In fact,

from its earliest days the United States had been loathe to strike the first blow or

be seen as an aggressor. Pre-emption had always been an option but previously

only in the most circumscribed situations.

Publication of The National Security Strategy coincided with the Bush

administration’s campaign to secure public and congressional support for a war

against Iraq. Iraq became the Bush Doctrine’s first test case. The administration

explicitly portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat. Bush stated:

We have experienced the horror of September 11. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people. Our enemies would be no less willing – in fact they would be eager – to use biological, or chemical, or a nuclear weapon. Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.1039

Such language was familiar to readers of national-security documents but was

now used to support a novel strategic posture. With regard to the policy of pre-

emption, neoconservatives employed imprecise language which increased the

range of the policy’s potential threat. Undersecretary of State Bolton said that he

hoped “the outcome in Iraq” would “cause other states in the region and indeed

around the world to look at the consequences of pursuing WMD and draw the

appropriate lesson that such pursuits are not in the long term national interest.”1040

Pre-emption required hegemony. In his preface to The National Security Strategy

Bush referred to “a balance of power that favors human freedom,” which was an

1038 M. Elaine Bunn, “Preemptive Action: When, How, and to What Effect?” Strategic Forum: Institute for National Strategic Studies, no. 200 (2003): 1. 1039 George W. Bush, “Address to the Nation on Iraq From Cincinnati, Ohio” (7 October 2002), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=73139&st=&st1=#axzz1okBzCLf0 [accessed 05/03/11]. 1040 John Bolton, quoted in Blinken, “From Preemption to Engagement,” 36–7.

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oxymoron, and the forsaking of “unilateral advantage,”1041 but the document’s

main thrust was clear: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential

adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hope of surpassing, or equalling,

the power of the United States.”1042 Bush’s West Point speech put it more bluntly:

“America has, and intends to keep, military strength beyond challenge.”1043

Bush’s foreign-policy approach was more proactive than Clinton’s. According to

the Clinton administration, because movement toward democracy and market

economics had become irreversible the United States need engage with the rest of

the world only to expedite this movement. The Bush administration rejected that

view and reshaped the discourse of national security so that pre-emption became

simply another overt tool of preponderance.

Step five of contextual analysis: a neoconservative future?

The final concluding step is an explanation of how ideological change comes to

be woven into ways of acting, how it comes to be convention or, indeed, how it

fails to become conventional. This is a step with which the neoconservatives

themselves would be acutely concerned because ideological struggle is the most

important component of “the key question, who owns the future?”1044 Certainly,

the two-term presidency of George W. Bush can be viewed as the victorious

culmination of nearly forty years of neoconservative ideological and grand

strategic struggle.

The revised conception of pre-emption presented in the 2002 National Security

Strategy recalled the transition advocated at the end of the Cold War from a

‘threats based’ to a ‘capabilities based’ approach to national security.1045 Whereas

a threats-based approach focuses on specific military threats posed by a clearly

identifiable enemy, a capabilities-based approach focuses on developing the

resources needed to “defeat any conceivable type of attack mounted by any

1041 White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States”, 3. 1042 Ibid., 33. 1043 Bush, “Commencement Address at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.” 1044 Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative Looking Back, Looking Ahead (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 253–6. 1045 Jaffe, The Development of the Base Force.

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imaginary adversary at any point in time.”1046 This was an unprecedented strategic

posture to adopt, based purely on a novel ideological conception of the world. The

two strategy documents that codified and elaborated this approach – the 1992

draft Defense Planning Guidance and the less strident Defense Strategy for the

1990s – can be seen as statements of neoconservative ideological intent.

The draft Defense Planning Guidance declared an unadulterated preventive

posture, stating that the first “objective” of U.S. policy was to “prevent the re-

emergence of a new rival . . . that poses a threat on the order of that posed

formerly by the Soviet Union.”1047 The strategy that emerged was centred on

competitors’ capabilities and aspirations, on potential rather than imminent threats

to the United States.

This line of logic extended to the 2002 National Security Strategy, and the Bush

Doctrine was predicated on a similar construal of the post-Cold War security

environment and its implications for security policy. The key theme of the 2002

National Security Strategy was a radically new security environment which

presented both new danger and also an opportunity for “translating this moment

of influence” so that America could continue “defending and preserving the

peace.”1048 This themes suggested a particualr logic of world order: national-

security policy should preserve U.S. pre-eminence, which would enable a just

peace.

Conclusion

As this chapter has demonstrated, a refashioned vision of American

exceptionalism lay at the heart of the Bush Doctrine. Read proleptically (or

perhaps, put more simply, with the ‘benefit’ of hindsight) it is very easy to

misread exactly what the ideological and strategic revolution of the second Bush

presidency meant. As this chapter has shown, a great many commentators confuse

the true nature of neoconservatism and with it the Bush Doctrine because they

misinterpret the nature of democracy within neoconservative thought. It is an easy

mistake to make, as so much neoconservative writing emphasises the spread of

1046 Michael T. Klare, “Endless Military Superiority,” The Nation, 15 July 2002, 2. 1047 Tyler, “Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan.” 1048 White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States,” 7.

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democracy; indeed, neoconservatism “thrives on this muddled [American]

ideological terrain.”1049 However, the problem with such readings is that it

overstates the line of continuity between neoconservative thought and more

familiar Wilsonian democracy. When read contextually or ‘forward’ from its roots

in the late 1960s, neoconservatism’s concern with American liberal thought and

antipathy towards realism becomes much clearer and provides a very different

understanding of the ideological importance of the Bush Doctrine.

Writing in 1996, William Kristol and Robert Kagan observed “Without a broad,

sustaining foreign-policy vision, the American people will be inclined to

withdraw from the world.”1050 For neoconservatives the creation of such a vision

or ‘purpose’ was at the heart of their ideological project; as Michael Williams puts

it, “the inability to formulate a socially compelling vision of the national interest

is a mark of degeneration.”1051 Neoconservatism had been formed in response to a

perceived nihilism in America. The project of neoconservatism thus becomes an

end in itself and its perpetuation a constant necessity to stave off domestic

nihilism. At the core of neoconservatism’s ‘future-orientated conservatism’ was a

form of American nationalism which completely transcended the barrier between

the domestic and the international. It required not just backward-looking

examinations of past glories but a commitment to ideals, to “the meaning of the

nation in a heroic sense capable of mobilizing individuals to virtuous action.”1052

This particular sense of purpose is strikingly apparent in the linguistic differences

between the 1999 and 2002 iterations of the U.S. National Security Strategy.

Whilst the language of the former is largely technocratic, the language of the latter

is redolently valiant and sees national interest become indivisible from national

greatness. Within this framework an ill-defined ‘war against terror’ potentially

limitless in scope and the perpetual possibility of conflict unleashed by an explicit

commitment to pre-emption make sense as animating principles for the

reinvigoration of republican virtue. Indeed, “neoconservatism can only sustain

itself by cultivating a level of limited but endemic conflict in the international

system and nurturing its support base in the name of an expansive foreign

1049 Drolet, “A Liberalism Betrayed?” 91. 1050 Kristol and Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” 26–7. 1051 Williams, “What Is the National Interest?” 310. 1052 Ibid., 317.

246

policy.”1053 The perhaps inevitable corollary of this “theatrical

micromilitarism”1054 is that there is a

lacuna at the heart of the neoconservative’s foreign policy agenda . . . it had very little to contribute once Iraq had been occupied . . . the intervention was not perceived . . . or sold to the American electorate as an extended exercise in either state building or military occupation. Instead it was to be a limited exercise in regime change and then state reform.1055

Despite this hollow core, the success of neoconservatism was its ability to

circumscribe its arguments within the familiar language of American

exceptionalism. Whilst this thesis does not agree, some commentators suggest that

the Bush Doctrine’s success will be its lack of innovation and, conversely, its

ability to bring together perennial strands in American grand strategy.1056 To

return to where this chapter started, the profusion of commentators who see

neoconservatism as a form of ‘hard’ Wilsonianism goes a long way in

demonstrating neoconservatism’s ideological success during the Bush years and

the way in which it seemed to represent a recognisable strand of American

ideology. This chapter has argued the contrary. Whilst neoconservatism has not

disappeared from public debate it is no longer as powerful an ideological force as

it was during the George W. Bush presidency. Nonetheless neoconservatism has

survived and mutated during its periods in the wilderness and it remains to be

seen whether it will reassert itself.

1053 Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 204–5. 1054 Ibid., 205. 1055 Dodge, “Coming Face to Face with Bloody Reality,” 261, 263. 1056 Lynch and Singh, After Bush.

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Chapter 8. Conclusion

The central argument made in this thesis is that American exceptionalism is a

necessary yet insufficient way of reading American grand strategy. Insufficient,

because it has always been a source of ideological contestation, employed in

different ways, by different people, and in different contexts to support and enable

different grand strategic projects. The thesis argues that grand strategy is

inherently ideological and that its focus is the creation of an idealised utopian

vision upon which the resources of the state can be deployed to that ideological

end. The lexical choices asserted in the titles of grand strategies often reflect this –

the ‘containment’ of Communism and the ‘enlargement’ of democracy are

unusual linguistic devices, bestowing physical manifestations and geographical

reach upon ultimately abstract political ideas.

It is not always clear what constitutes a presidential doctrine and, apart from the

Truman Doctrine, few have explicitly been given a title. The aim of this thesis has

been the recreation of ideological debate, which this thesis has already suggested

usually lacks analytic rigour and is often expressed in fragments. As Raymond

Geuss conceives of it, such discourse is composed of “historically congealed

kinds of rhetorical appeal, which make use of quasi-propositional fragments.”1057

As a result the thesis has taken a deliberately expansive approach to the texts that

express American grand strategy at any particular historical juncture.

As the methodological commitments of contextualism indicate, the thesis has

argued that it is not possible to compose a temporally stable grand narrative of

American foreign policy, and nor is it possible to impose a “mythology of

coherence”1058 upon American exceptionalism, for American exceptionalism does

not have static meaning. The aim has not been to provide a new singular meaning

of American exceptionalism – this thesis’s epistemological commitment would

make such a goal fruitless – and nor has the thesis attempted to suggest whether

America has ever been exceptional or not.

The thesis has, however, necessarily been as concerned with elements of

ideological continuity as it has with ideological innovation. The most pronounced

1057 Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics, 157. 1058 Lawson, “The Eternal Divide?” 14.

248

continuity in debate about American exceptionalism and how America should

assert itself internationally has been the interplay of domestic and international

concerns. Equally, the possibility that foreign policy might have a material and

moral impact on the nature of the Union has been a longstanding element of

exceptionalist debate.

The thesis has posited a view of ideology as social practice and the resulting

individual case studies have illustrated both ideological continuity and change.

The key issue has been trying to recreate the authorial intention of the innovating

ideologists, what they were trying to do. To overcome the “mythology of

coherence” and, equally, to emphasise elements of ideological continuity, this

thesis has recreated the ideological context at four critical junctures in American

foreign policy in order to demonstrate the way in which four presidents and their

key advisors – “ideological innovators,” in Quentin Skinner’s lexicon1059 – have

attempted ideological innovation and dominance through the articulation of grand

strategy which necessitated a refashioning of American exceptionalism.

The research has shown that the process of ideological innovation involves the

manipulation of existing politico-moral concepts to legitimate a particular course

of action. In being forced to use existing conceptual and linguistic devices,

however, limits are placed upon innovating ideologists in terms of what they can

articulate intelligibly. This is what Skinner means when he suggests that “every

revolutionary is to this extent obliged to march backwards into battle.”1060 The

effect of this, however, is that even revolutionary texts can have an intrinsic

appearance of familiarity, which can prove illusory. This thesis has recreated four

of these ‘backward marches’.

The first of these ‘re-creations’, in Chapter 4, centres around the ideological

context which led to the strategy of containment. The chapter illustrated that

Truman, Acheson, and Nitze were the central ideological innovators at that point,

albeit buttressed for the first time in American history by a narrow, circumscribed

national-security elite. The Truman Doctrine represented a rejection of differing

realist and cosmopolitan versions of potential postwar American internationalism

1059 Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, 149. 1060 Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Thought and Action,” 17.

249

which had been put forward by Walter Lippmann, Henry Luce, and George

Kennan. All three of their visions moved away from pre-war American

isolationism, whilst stressing American exceptionalism. Truman and Acheson’s

main ideological innovation was to create a grand strategy which put at its very

centre a Manichean binary between ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’. It produced a new

conception of American exceptionalism in which not only did America have a

global responsibility to defend freedom everywhere but any challenge to that

freedom was now perceived as a threat to the national security of the United

States. It Not only universalised American values but left the legacy of a grand

strategy which was motivated by the defence of an idea rather than concrete

material goals.

The way in which Truman and Acheson effected their ideological innovation is of

considerable importance to this thesis. Their strategic revolution is a paradigmatic

example of Skinner’s model of ideological innovation. As Michael Hogan noted

about NSC-68, it managed to “wrap departures from tradition, in tradition

itself.”1061 Chapter Four illustrated the way in which both the Truman Doctrine

and NSC-68 leveraged a diverse range of existing language, lexical constructs,

and texts in order to give legitimacy to texts that actually marked a significant

departure from the existing conventions of American exceptionalism. Both the

Truman Doctrine and NSC-68 employed the conventions of the Wilsonian

rhetoric of freedom and Rooseveltian wartime rhetoric to invoke a global mission.

Yet, at the same time, normal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union were

presented as being completely untenable.

The successes of the ideological innovation of Truman, Acheson and Nitze can be

seen by the degree to which the ideas of the Truman Doctrine were encapsulated

in, and actually extended even further by, NSC-68, one of the foundational texts

of the early Cold War. The underlying aim of that document was “to assure the

integrity and vitality of our free society,”1062 but it conflated the preservation of a

domestic regime with ideological hegemony. The legacy was massive military

buildup and the continued reference, even in contemporary foreign-policy debate,

to the policy of containment.

1061 Hogan, A Cross of Iron, 298. 1062 NSC-68; emphasis added.

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Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon were less successful in their attempt at

ideological innovation. Chapter 5 not only examined the nature of their project but

also suggested why détente failed to become an enduring part of the foreign-

policy lexicon. Détente was conceived as a response to domestic attacks from

both the Left and the Right of the political spectrum. These attacks had, in part,

been caused by the idea that a pervasive sense of American domestic malaise was

caused by the crusading Vietnam War. Writers such as Daniel Bell and Kenneth

Galbraith suggested that the existing ideological debate in America, which had

underpinned the undifferentiated globalism of containment, was simply no longer

socially adequate for American social realities. In fact, Bell asserted that

American ideology had become more concerned with restraining domestic

pressure for international change. Kissinger’s response was to adopt European-

style realism as America’s grand strategy. Chapter 5 suggests that, even whilst he

was promoting realism, Kissinger’s approach to détente was more ideological

than realist. Whilst both Nixon and Kissinger pointed to America’s limited

capabilities, the global reach of détente re-evoked America’s limitless strategic

expectations. The emphasis which détente placed upon interdependence was

undercut by Kissinger’s determination to defend American credibility. The point

is that this form of détente was actually not realist at all but an attempt by Nixon

and Kissinger to maintain bipolarity and the containment of Communism. Far

from the retrenchment that might have been expected of a realist grand strategy,

Kissinger pursued ongoing globalism and engagement. It was an ideological

grand strategy which continued with the premise of American exceptionalism and

bipolarity whilst, paradoxically, publicly trying to purge itself of ideological taint.

In the pursuit of Soviet ‘self-restraint’ Kissinger was actually engaged in a

profoundly ideological goal. To get the Soviet Union to abandon revolutionary

projects and to accept the legitimacy of an American-dominated international

system was perhaps even more ideologically ambitious than the logic of

containment. Ironically, whilst détente was innovative, Kissinger’s own attempts

to strip the strategy of its overt ideological components sowed the seeds of its

destruction. Détente failed to become a conventional part of the strategic lexicon

because, by consciously distancing détente from ideology, Kissinger pushed the

supporting logic of his policy far beyond the governing conventions of American

exceptionalism. The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) ultimately killed off

251

détente by suggesting that it had fostered moral equivalence between America and

the Soviet Union (it had not). Nonetheless, the CPD’s criticism, combined with

neoconservative aversion to realism, led Ronald Reagan’s presidential platform to

openly oppose détente.

The end of the Cold War presented an opportunity to reshape American

exceptionalism. Whilst the Clinton administration did not bring about major

ideological reorientation, it did articulate a largely coherent grand strategy.

Although America was in a position of unmatched military and economic strength

after the fall of the Berlin Wall it was unclear what the ‘new world order’, as the

first Bush president called it, would look like. Clinton came into power in the

midst of intellectual argument surrounding the shape of the new world order. On

the one hand, Paul Kennedy typified arguments that warned that America was at

the zenith of an imperial moment and needed to bolster its economic base to ward

off almost inevitable imperial decline. On the other, Francis Fukuyama was the

acceptable face of neoconservative thought which both descriptively and

prescriptively pointed towards American ideological and material hegemony.

Fukuyama was vague enough about American purpose at ‘the end of history’ that

even non-neoconservatives were able to accept at least part of his vision of

America’s ideological pervasiveness. The identification of the misreading of

Fukuyama in the 1990s and the conflation of his ideas with the apparent

inevitability of the spread of democracy only serves to highlight the type of

historical knowledge which contextualism facilitates.

Clinton’s major ideological innovation was ‘democratic enlargement’ and,

although he repeatedly invoked the “inexorable logic of globalization,”1063 his

sense of the ‘inexorable logic’ was closer to Fukuyama than Samuel Huntington’s 1063 William J. Clinton, “Remarks on United States Foreign Policy in San Francisco” (26 February 1999), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=57170&st=inexorable&st1=globalization#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 05/09/11]; William J. Clinton, “Remarks at a Saxophone Club and Women’s Leadership Forum Reception in Los Angeles, California” (26 February 1999), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=57177&st=inexorable&st1=globalization#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 05/09/11]; William J. Clinton, “Proclamation 7239 – Columbus Day 1999” (8 October 1999), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=56688&st=inexorable&st1=globalization#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 05/09/11]; William J. Clinton, “Remarks on Funding to Provide Debt Relief for Poor Nations” (6 November 2000), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=1058&st=inexorable&st1=globalization#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 05/09/11].

252

dystopia. Despite this relative optimism regarding the meaning of American

hegemony, the Clinton administration’s view of how American preponderant

power should be deployed differed from that of the neoconservatives whose draft

Defense Planning Guidance1064 blueprint had been leaked to the press in the early

1990s. This thesis suggests that the strategy of enlargement was a sustained

ideological articulation of American exceptionalism. It filled the void of post-

Cold War American purpose which Fukuyama had left to be answered by his

ideological brethren who had been in place at the Department of Defense. Whilst

the strategy of enlargement maintained a Wilsonian commitment to the support of

democracy and the maintenance of liberal international institutions, its explicit

commitment to democratic enlargement was via the economic elements of foreign

policy. Clinton was less consistent in the exercise of military intervention and was

well aware that it was American hegemony that allowed him to pursue an a la

carte approach to multilateralism.

In terms of the success of Clinton’s ideological refashioning of grand strategy, he

bequeathed an unusual mix of legacies. Democratic enlargement fitted quite easily

within the conventions of exceptionalist discourse, and it did not prove terribly

difficult for the Clinton administration, wounded by the criticisms of inaction in

Rwanda, to later attach a form of liberal hawkishness to their grand strategy.

Although it would be unwise to overstate the place of intervention and, in

particular, unilateral intervention in Clinton’s grand strategy, it is a point of

significant continuity with the presidency of George W. Bush.

Despite George W. Bush’s having attacked Clinton’s record on foreign policy

during the campaign, and his ‘anything but Clinton’ mantra once in power, the

ideological success of Clinton’s grand strategy was shown in Bush’s continuing

with much of it until 9/11. Apart from a sustained critique of Clinton’s

interventions for lacking a strategic rationale and a narrowing of what constituted

the national interest, there was significant cross-over between the two

administrations. As presidential candidate and early in his presidency, George W.

Bush often displayed contradictory elements of both realism and neoconservatism

which frustrated attempts to conveniently pigeonhole his early grand strategic

1064 U.S. Department of Defense, “Defense Planning Guidance, FY 1994–1999.”

253

designs, even if his key advisors were at pains to stress Bush’s realist approach.

Bush’s limited conception of the national interest was reaffirmed by the 2001

Quadrennial Defense Review,1065 which prioritised domestic security and

deterrence, had no real policy of rolling back rogue states, and took no aggressive

action against Iraq. Nonetheless, if Bush’s ‘balance of power that favors freedom’

seemed incomprehensible when first enunciated in his 2001 inaugural address, by

the time it was repeated in the 2002 National Security Strategy1066 the meaning

seemed much clearer. 9/11 facilitated two significant changes: first, as Gary

Dorrien put it, “George W. Bush fully joined his own administration,”1067 which

ended the balancing between neoconservatives and realists in the administration;

second, it allowed a radical change in the normative parameters of American

exceptionalism. The attacks of 9/11 became the focus of the Bush administration

and made a neoconservative ideological revolution much easier. However, it is

important not to overestimate the degree of ideological innovation that the Bush

Doctrine represented. For instance, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq in 2003

considerable focus was placed on the appearance of ‘pre-emption’ in the 2002

National Security Strategy and the degree of novelty this represented. In 1904,

President Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine was a policy

of preventive intervention in the Americas. This was echoed again prior to the

United States’ entry into the Second World War by Roosevelt’s justification of

anticipatory self-defence against German ships: “When you see a rattlesnake

poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.”1068

Pre-emption was certainly a good fit with neoconservatism in terms of compelling

‘rogue states’ to behave in accordance with American policy objectives; however,

it was by no means a novel concept.

In examining neconservatism from its inception rather than proleptically, the

thesis showed that a Skinnerian reading of the Bush Doctrine yields a different

sense of the ideological innovation that it represented. First, neoconservatism had

primarily been motivated by a sense of disgust with American nihilism and

1065 U.S. Department of Defense, “Quadrennial Defense Review.” 1066 White House, “National Security Strategy of the United States.” 1067 Dorrien, Imperial Designs, 2. 1068 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat” (11 September 1941), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16012&st=&st1=#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 05/09/11].

254

cultural relativism in the 1960s and 1970s and thus the primary neoconservative

goal was a domestic one, willing the recreation of republican virtue in America.

From a neoconservative perspective, 9/11, and more specifically the identification

of an enemy, was precisely the kind of event that would give normative substance

to America and prevent cultural disintegration. From that perspective Bush’s call

to arms “In the new world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of

action”1069 had both an international and domestic connotation. Second, the

elements of democracy promotion had been a later addition to neoconservatism

during the Reagan administration, when the defence of human rights had been

fused with the promotion of narrow, polyarchic democracies. The type of

democracy neoconservatives wished to export was elitist and its purpose was

largely connected to facilitating an international environment dominated by the

hegemony of the United States. As a result, proleptic readings of the Bush

Doctrine have overemphasised the links between neoconservatism and

Wilsonianism. Indeed, the success of neoconservatism in becoming ideologically

‘conventional’ was in large part because it expressed its innovations within the

acceptable discursive parameters of exceptionalist debate. As Robert Kaplan

expressed rather crudely, America had to “Speak Victorian, think Pagan.”1070

In his second inaugural address Bush made the bold ideological assertion that

“The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty

in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom

in all the world.”1071 It was a remarkable recreation of the logic of NSC-68 and,

perhaps most importantly of all, Bush demonstrated the ‘conventionality’ of such

an ideological understanding of U.S. security interests by stating “We are led, by

events and common sense, to one conclusion.”1072

All of the individual studies in the thesis have illustrated the degree to which the

normative architecture of American grand strategy has been continually re-formed

and challenged. The point is that political actors need to gain control of the

1069 George W. Bush, “The President’s Radio Address” (20 April 2002), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25071&st=path+to+safety&st1=#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 05/09/11]. 1070 Robert D. Kaplan, “Supremacy by Stealth,” Atlantic Monthly (July–August 2003), 83. 1071 George W. Bush, “[Second] Inaugural Address” (20 January 2005), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=58745#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 05/09/11]. 1072 Ibid; emphasis added.

255

dominant languages structuring political discourse within their society. It remains

to be seen how correct President Bush was in asserting that his ideological vision

had become “common sense.”1073 An op-ed in the New York Times declared

triumphantly in the wake of Barack Obama’s inaugural address: “In about 20

minutes, he swept away eight years of President George Bush’s false choices and

failed policies and promised to recommit to America’s most cherished ideals.”1074

Certainly, the expectations of those hoping for wholesale ideological change from

President Obama have not yet been fulfilled.1075 While President Obama has

stopped using many of the more controversial linguistic constructions of the Bush

administration, such as “the war on terror,”1076 there are striking points of

continuity between Obama and George W. Bush which are not just limited to

inherited military campaigns. Obama has continued with the pre-emptive use of

force, which is the strategic doctrine behind the use of preventive drone strikes in

Pakistan and Yemen. He has also demonstrated a willingness to pursue selective

unilateralism, notably in the operation against Osama Bin Laden. This has been

unequivocally clarified in his justification for intervention in Libya, and, although

that action had the backing of the UN Security Council,1077 Obama declared “I’ve

made it clear that I will never hesitate to use our military swiftly, decisively, and

unilaterally when necessary to defend our people, our homeland, our allies, and

our core interests.”1078 Whilst it seems unlikely that Barack Obama shares with

Bush the underlying ideological commitments of neoconservatism,1079 he will

certainly be constrained to some extent by the ideological discourse that preceded

him. He is yet to make a well-defined ideological contribution to American grand

strategy of his own.

1073 Ibid. 1074 “President Obama,” New York Times, 20 January 2009, A30. 1075 Trevor McCrisken, “Ten Years On: Obama’s War on Terrorism in Rhetoric and Practice,” International Affairs – Oxford, 87, no. 4 (2011): 781–802. 1076 White House, “National Security Strategy” (May 2010), http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security_strategy.pdf [accessed 05/09/11]. 1077 See Security Council statement of 17/03/11 accompanying Resolution 1973, http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm#Resolution [accessed 05/09/11]. 1078 Barack Obama, “Address to the Nation on the Situation in Libya” (28 March 2011), http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=90195&st=&st1=#axzz1p2OXRSPX [accessed 05/09/11]. 1079 Obama’s Libya intervention attracted the unlikely bedfellow of William Kristol. See William Kristol, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” The Weekly Standard – The Blog, 28 March 2011, http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/you-ve-come-long-way-baby_555622.html [accessed 05/09/11].

256

This thesis has used a theory of social life and social change to contribute to the

process of revealing a far richer American political tradition within the arena of

foreign-policy thought than either diplomatic history or positivist theories of

International Relations allow. The history of grand strategy in America has not

simply been limited to rational calculation of policy and political dealing but has

been one of continual ideological contest. The thesis has attempted to strip itself

of the ‘benefit’ of hindsight in order to understand how and why successive

generations of political actors have sought to refashion America’s role anew in the

world. America’s strategic posture has not been the only thing at stake: so too has

been the reproduction of the animating principles of the Republic.

257

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